


blame it on cocaine lines

by lagardère (laurore), MissAntlers



Category: Trust (TV 2018)
Genre: Age Difference, Drug Use, Dubious Ethics, M/M, POV Alternating, Somehow, This is a love story, all roads lead to rome and also to calabria, but how do i know he loves me for me and not just my international crime empire?, irresponsible partying, where Primo is the embodiment of the text post that goes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-19
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:22:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 21
Words: 84,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28172364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurore/pseuds/lagard%C3%A8re, https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissAntlers/pseuds/MissAntlers
Summary: Primo never had anything but the back of his father’s hand and a beat up car that was secondhand even when he got it, and when his uncle said“So what are you going to do, take a girl out in it?”his father snorted and said“He doesn’t have a girl”and that was that, a lost cause and everyone knew it. But he grew up kissing saints, so why not this boy with a face like a Renaissance martyr?
Relationships: John Paul Getty III/Primo Nizzuto
Comments: 218
Kudos: 94





	1. The Calati house

**Author's Note:**

> we started writing this last summer and it stands at roughly... 70k words now? it covers the same time period as the show and then goes on into the early '80s.
> 
> if it needed to be said, this is based on the show, and is therefore a fiction based on a fiction distantly inspired by real-life events

There’s something about the Calati house, concealed deep in the hills, that gives everything a kind of secrecy, like nobody in the world can see anything that happens here, and there is something happening, Primo’s been through the dance enough times to know the way it starts, fingers brushing over cigarettes, eyes that linger too long on collarbones or wrists, and the kid’s not subtle. He’s probably never had to be subtle in his life. Nobody’s ever told him anything’s wrong with him.

Maybe that’s why Primo does any of it — cocaine and strip joints and nights that seem to last years and yet no time at all, driving home like he doesn’t care if he comes off the road, because maybe he doesn’t. Everyone in that damn town decided there was something wrong with him, so why not just go all out, burn the world down. Never had anything but the back of his father’s hand and a beat up car that was secondhand even when he got it, and when his uncle said  _ “So what are you going to do, take a girl out in it?”  _ his father snorted and said  _ “He doesn’t have a girl”  _ and that was that, a lost cause and everyone knew it. But he grew up kissing saints, so why not this boy with a face like a Renaissance martyr, who wraps his legs around Primo’s waist in the dark now as he cries out  _ Jesus Christ you’re such a bastard _ before Primo has a chance to cover his mouth so the others don’t hear.

  
  
  
  
  


The first time it happens, they are both wired on cocaine, and maybe that’s the excuse they give themselves afterwards. Paul tells them about his dogs, making the silhouettes of his hands dance across the bare wall, glancing back every now and then to see if Primo is still watching him, and he always is, inscrutable but intense, and while Angelo and Dante seem to fade wearily into the background of the evening, the sense of expectation grows between them until it fills the room like the haze of cigarette smoke lingering around them. And when Primo eventually shrugs at Dante, says _ “I’ll take him to the barn,” _ Paul feels a shiver across the back of his neck, the kind that has him already arching his back against the wall as Primo closes the barn door behind them, taking a moment to look him up and down before he’s burying his long fingers in Paul’s hair, kissing him like he’s angry about it. He only pulls away to spit in his hand, and then turns Paul round and has him up against the door, breathing raggedly against his ear, while Paul bites his lip to keep himself from saying the kind of things he usually murmurs when he’s fucking Martine. _ I love you, I love you, Jesus Christ I love you. _ But maybe he does, a little bit, it’s just in his nature. Adores anyone who shows him the slightest bit of attention.

Afterwards, Primo looks somewhat surprised by himself, busies his hands lighting up a cigarette as he leans back on the wall, and in all the hours between now and when it happens again, Paul will catch himself looking at those hands with a certain primal satisfaction that he had been wanted by a man like that.

  
  
  
  
  


Time and again he’s been told that Italy is beautiful. The beauty of the buildings and the people and the light, this golden haze that painters and sculptors captured in artworks that now hang on the walls of palazzi and churches where the stones echo with the sound of centuries-old steps, centuries-old voices. 

Paul snorted coke off tabletops and off the twins’ slender, tanned wrists, and he’d taken it all in with the eyes of a child who didn’t believe any wrong would ever befall him, of a boy who’d inhaled enough drugs to forget the past and abolish the future, to live in endless awe. This is how he approaches this as well - in those frequent moments when he forgets to be afraid - he looks at Primo like he used to look at paintings, like a part of him wants to kiss the brushstrokes in reverence and the rest of him is trying to decide how long he could live off the work if he took a knife to the canvas and cut it apart from the frame, even though he knows he doesn’t have it in him. He’ll never raise a knife against a painting, let alone a person, and Primo must know that too, Primo who tells him that,  _ “violence is a common thing around here”, _ but who seems to forget that in the handful of seconds before he withdraws from Paul, when he rises on an elbow and takes a look at him in the chiaroscuro of the ruined house, parting Paul’s hair with urgent hands, putting some order in his tangled curls. “You’re such a bastard,” Paul says, not for the first time, but it doesn’t sound like a reproach (it never did).

  
  
  
  
  


Sometimes, afterwards, the boy will throw his arm across Primo’s chest, even though it’s always too hot to be close like that, too hot to even breathe, but Primo figures no one’s ever told Paul he can’t have what he wants. And always, always he starts up with this “We could…” nonsense. Primo only understands that much from the American songs he hears on the radio between Rome and Calabria, and Paul will dig his chin into Primo’s shoulder and say “We could…” like he thinks there is some kind of future tense in a place like this.  _ “There’s no  _ ‘we’”, Primo tells him, and rolls over so that he doesn’t have to look at those naive blue eyes. Paul says, “Yeah, but —” and it’s time to put a stop to that, Primo pushes him out of bed.

  
  
  
  
  


His father would be proud of him: only fuck yourself up with the best things, the real gourmet shit, and it’s not as if Martine doesn’t like sex, she’s down for anything, she just doesn’t seem to care if it’s with Paul (she slept with Marcello, for Christ sakes,  _ Marcello _ ), but Paul thinks maybe it matters to him — not who’s fucking Martine but who’s fucking him. Someone like Primo, who moves through the world like he’s trying to tear a hole in it, who knows the hills and the curves of the road like he knows the space between his legs, who always seems like he’s sitting back with his boots up on the table, even when he isn’t: Paul thinks it’s only natural to want someone like that to notice you, a little.

  
  
  
  
  


Dante knows. How could he not, with the snatches of sound he hears, the boy’s breathing loud enough that it carries through stone, and the first time it happened he thought Primo had lost it, they need the boy alive and whole and short of killing him this has to be the worst possible course of action. The second time, it dawns on him that it isn’t sounds of protest he’s hearing. Something more tenuous, something like pleasure. When Primo comes out it takes all of his considerable patience not to convey to him how stupid he thinks he’s being. He tries with the boy, too, to the extent that he feels he safely can. 

_ “Stupid idea,”  _ he mutters, the next time it’s his turn to feed him, and when Paul just stares guilelessly at him with those bright blue eyes, he decides to lie. _ “He’s married,”  _ he says, gesturing roughly like this will manifest the idea of Primo in the damp room. 

Kidnapping aside, they live at their most untroubled when they pretend Primo doesn’t exist, which can be something of a feat given how painfully present the man can be, even in absentia. It’s the vivid memory of the cold barrel of a gun pressed at the back of your neck, paired with the knowledge that Primo might just decide to press the trigger this time around. Forever playing roulette with his changeable mood and someone else’s life.

_ “He’s married,”  _ he repeats, and Paul’s face goes from ingenuous to thoroughly unimpressed.  _ Really?  _ the clear eyes seem to say.  _ Him? _

Dante has to concede it wasn’t a very convincing lie, but he figures, for the good of this operation and if he really wants to pocket a share of that ransom, he had to try. So he just huffs and leaves and the next time Primo kicks him out of the house and closes the door, he goes for a walk in the woods, leaving behind the house and Angelo, who’s staring sulkily at the fire like maybe he hasn’t quite grasped the gravity of the situation, or maybe he has, and he’s decided it’s all the same and they’re dead anyways, in which case he’s somewhat sharper than Dante had thought he was.

  
  
  
  
  


“Hey,” Paul says, propping himself up on his elbows. “Are you really married?”

It’s not that he’d really believed Dante, he tells himself, it’s more obscure than that. Some voice from his childhood warning him not to be anything like his parents.

“Sei sposato?” he asks again, and Primo gives him a very odd look. And then he laughs, in the awkward, breathy kind of way a man might laugh if he’s not used to it. And it’s not so bad, Paul thinks, to be the one who made that happen.

“Paol,” Primo says, in that heavily accented way of his, and Paul waits for him to say something else, but he just leans over to fish his cigarettes out of his jacket.

Paul tries to affect that glassy-eyed look that sometimes wins him a cigarette of his own, but laughing seems to have used up the best of Primo’s good mood for today.

  
  
  
  
  


(There’s something about the way Primo says his name, on those rare occurrences when he slips and does so, that makes Paul feel like maybe he doesn’t have to be a Getty, or rather, the last of the Getty, a diminished version of those who came before him - like maybe he could be an actual person. And he did feel like that when Martine said it, sometimes, a little, when she said it brisk of laughing or loving but never with that sort of languor, _ Paol, _ that tugs at Paul’s insides, would send him fumbling through the dark with outstretched hands in search of Primo’s hands and mouth, wanting to hear it again, dismissive as it may sound, like Primo hasn’t bothered to learn the proper pronunciation and never will.)

  
  
  
  
  


Paul is making dandelion chains with Angelo in the garden when Primo comes back from town. They can hear his music howling from a mile off through the hills. Then Primo comes swaggering down the path with his jacket slung over his shoulder, and nods with a jerk of his head that Paul knows means he wants to go upstairs, and he’s not unexcited by that. It’s always better upstairs, as opposed to the dank little barn. There’s a mattress on a rickety bed frame, and shutters to keep out the worst of the heat, and there’s something about lying down with someone while they fuck you, something much more intimate. They could almost be lovers.

Primo often goes into town to use the phone, or to buy wine, which he usually drinks by himself on the drive home. But once he brought Paul a Calabrian orange, which was very sweet. The orange, not the gesture. Or it might have been, if Primo hadn’t sat and watched him intently while he ate.

So many lines, Paul thinks. Lines of cocaine and strips of orange peel and the seams of their mouths and hand rolled cigarettes and their bodies pressed flush against each other even on sticky afternoons. So many lines, and when and how are they crossed, and what is on the other side of them? What could there possibly be, with a man like this?

But what surprises him most is not so much what he’s doing, but rather that when Dante confronted him, tried to put him off, Paul had been reluctant to give Primo up, so perhaps they are already on the other side of something.

Now, as though wanting to test this theory, he reaches up and plucks the cigarette from Primo’s hand, putting it to his own lips. And Primo looks unimpressed, but he doesn’t get up, just settles back against the bed frame wearily, so there they are, lying at an angle to each other, two strange lines intersecting.

  
  
  
  
  


_ “Yes, but why?” _ Dante asks, and Angelo nods.

“Yeah, why are we plucking the pheasants?”

“Because that’s…” Paul frowns. “I don’t know, man, that’s just how the rhyme goes. Do you wanna learn it or not?”

“Not really.” Angelo sighs and flops back against the sun-warmed stones of the old house. “But there’s nothing else to do, I guess.”

_ “What are you idiots doing?”  _ Primo sits up in the grass some yards away, where he’s been dozing for most of the afternoon, although Paul doubts the man ever really goes to sleep unless copious amounts of alcohol are involved.

“Fucking peasants,” Dante says proudly.

Primo puts his sunglasses on and lies back down. _ “I don’t _ ‘fuck peasants’.”

Angelo rolls his eyes, muttering, “Just little millionaires, eh?” and Paul is glad Primo probably didn’t hear.

  
  
  
  
  


Even if they possessed the vocabulary, Paul has a feeling they probably wouldn’t talk about art. Primo doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who spends his weekends wandering around the Borghese, not unless they were running an exhibition on firearms and cigarettes.

(A somewhat unfair assumption – Primo knows bits and pieces about art in the same way Paul knows all the words to the Coca Cola advert. It’s something you grow up with, in a country like this. And these days Primo thinks about the Old Italian Masters more than he used to, bragging a little to nobody but himself that any of them would have given their right arm for a chance to paint the boy who goes to bed with him sometimes.)

Paul doesn’t know any of that, of course. But while Primo is occupied with his triumph over Renaissance painters, Paul lies back on the mattress in the Calati house and thinks of Roman sculptors, of emperors who had their lovers recreated in stone and marble. And there are fleeting moments, when Primo gets out of bed and stands by the shutters to light a cigarette, Paul will stare at the long lines of his body, and the curve of his back where he dug his fingers only minutes before, and think  _ He’d have made a hell of a sculpture _ . But the thing about stone is its permanence. These things last for thousands of years, and Primo lives too fast to stick around like that.

  
  
  
  
  


“I just really wanna kiss you sometimes, man,” Paul says, in the no-man’s-land moment before they peel themselves off the mattress and shrug back into their clothes, and Primo clicks his tongue at him like he maybe he can tell what Paul means just by the way he says it and he’s not impressed. Paul thinks _ I know you only want me because of the money, but I think I want you, like, really want you. _

“We could go to Morocco,” he says, and Primo rolls his eyes. He knows that one, has heard Paul say it plenty of times before.

“We could, man, no one would know us, we could live like princes.”

_ “Princes, you’re already a prince,”  _ Primo mutters, which would maybe be romantic if it was anybody else saying it, if it didn’t sound like a taunt.

“Yeah, sure. I sleep in a barn. Una stalla. Not exactly the Ritz, is it.”

_ “You sleep here,” _ Primo hooks a finger under his chin, none too gently, but he adds in his lazy swaggering English, “With me”, and just like that, Paul thinks, he has a whole different value, like he’s nobody’s heir, nobody’s ransom, just something Primo has decided is worth having, for now.

And Paul has always been fond of history, has read enough of it to know that from the start this has been the most basic of human currencies — to want something, and be wanted in return.

  
  
  
  
  


_ Is this about the money?  _ Primo wonders, but it’s only a passing thought. He’s never been one for reflexion, let alone self-reflexion, the old men can have that, he’ll be there to clean their cheap, convoluted plans. Maybe it’s about the money and maybe it isn’t. He wouldn’t be here fucking Paul if Paul wasn’t worth millions, and that’s all there is to it, really, the rest of it, Paul’s sleepy smiles and the way his body tenses under Primo’s when he’s worked him up, the angles of elbows and knees digging into his sides, Paul’s shoulders wide enough to cover him, almost, and the tousled red hair and Paul’s foolishly trusting nature and the shadows at the tip of his long fingers, well, Primo might carry it with him from time to time, images creeping upon him in rare moments of clarity, but he knows how to chase that away. The saints had their visions of rapture too and it usually ended in martyrdom, and whatever rapture Paul brings (Primo lying flattened on that broken bed like he’s been struck by lightning, gripping Paul’s curls so hard he’ll find red hair caught in his fingers halfway to Rome), he won’t let it get to his head.

That’s what the narcotics are for.

  
  
  
  
  


“What do you think is going to happen, exactly?” Angelo asks.

They’re drawing lazily on their arms with charcoal from last night’s campfire. Angelo’s drawings are not very good, but Paul tries not to hold that against him.

“Like, when we get paid?”

“You’re not getting paid, hippy. I’m probably not even getting paid.  _ They’re _ the ones getting the money.” Angelo glances over to where Dante and Primo are slouching on the stone steps like lizards in the morning heat. Dante offers one of the liquorice sticks that he likes to chew and Primo looks at him in disgust.

“Well then what?” Paul frowns. “I don’t think anything, man, life’s just gonna happen the way it happens.”

“What do you think’s going to happen with _ him, _ eh? He’s just going to sling you over his shoulder and you ride off into the sunset together with seventeen million dollars?”

_ Well what would be so wrong with that? _ Paul thinks, without really meaning to. It was his plan, after all, he ought to get some of the cash. And for seventeen million dollars he wouldn’t complain about being slung over Primo’s shoulder.

“We’d have to drive off,” he says. “In his shitty old car.”

“You’re joking.”

Paul isn’t used to people looking sorry for him, but he gets the feeling that’s how Angelo looks now. “Obviously I’m joking.”

“Then stop drawing little hearts on your arm.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


(Paul, waking from some nightmare — about the churning dark waters around his grandfather’s oil rig, or his step-mother’s body going cold, or even the trunk of the car where Primo made him ride squashed in with Berto — lies in the darkness breathing heavily for a few moments, rubbing his hand over his face to try and still himself, until he feels Primo’s arm around his shoulders, and clings onto it like maybe in some other world, if they were some other versions of themselves, he might pull him out of that water.)

  
  
  
  
  


“What about your girlfriend?” Angelo asks, and Dante both admires and hates him for it, because he wishes he’d thought of it, surely this will do it, the rich girl Paul intends to marry. In Dante’s mind she’s a hippy as well, long-legged with big sunglasses and silky black hair and golden skin, although that’s probably too Italian for the boy’s taste. She’s got to be American.

And yet, Paul doesn’t seem abashed or troubled or otherwise concerned. He just blinks those blue eyes at them and smiles a quiet smile.

“It’s not the same, is it?” he says, like it’s a question and he expects them to have the answer.

_ “It’s not the same because you fuck her and you let Primo fuck you?”  _ Dante asks, and nods towards Angelo so he’ll translate.

Angelo glares at him.

“It’s not the same because she’s a woman?”

Paul shakes his head with a rueful smile.

“No, she actually, you know. She likes me.”

From the surprise on Angelo’s face, Dante can tell neither of them had expected to hear so much sense come out of the boy’s mouth.

“Is he...” Angelo begins, and stalls, though it’s not like he knows how to hide what he’s thinking and they can read it plain on his face.  _ Is he forcing you _ and  _ What could I even do about it if that was the case. _

“Oh, no,” Paul says. The small, soft smile on his face is the same as when he was talking about the girl he’d like to marry. “It’s nothing like that. But the one thing my father taught me is that if you want something, you should go for it, even if it’s bad for you. Even if it’s the sort of thing that could kill you.”

Dante looks at Angelo, waiting for a translation, but Angelo is far too busy staring at Paul like what he’s just said is about the stupidest thing he’s ever heard.

  
  
  
  
  


Paul knows, instinctively, that it’s safer that way. Even when Primo moves around in his sleep - a sleep that’s never anything but troubled - and accidentally cuffs Paul, eyes wide and vividly blue in the low light, mumbling an apology before he goes back to sleep; when he stares avidly at Paul while Paul licks orange juice off his fingers, like he’d like his tongue other places; when he kisses his way down Paul’s stomach and between his legs with a sort of abandon Paul isn’t used to from Italians, not unless they’re at church, and Primo will look up with what must be meant as menace and would maybe translate as such if he didn’t keep coming back for more, like Paul had licked that orange peel, with the same sort of hopeless desire for something he’d never have thought could feel so wretchedly good.

Paul’s survival instincts aren’t the best but he knows it’s better to pretend Primo is scratching an itch, obeying some primal impulse, because he isn’t equipped to deal with anything else (anything more) than that.


	2. Caves and tunnels

It is a strange, tense drive, with the Getty boy sitting curled up in the back of the car, Angelo Calati’s blood still drying on his face. Even with what English Leonardo can speak, he wouldn’t know how to start a conversation with him now.

Primo drives like he does anything else, like he doesn’t care if it kills him or anyone in the vicinity. Leonardo keeps gripping the dashboard, as if that will be of any help, and it makes him feel so much older than he is. He remembers Primo when he was a boy, little more than a nuisance then, dropped off at Leonardo’s mother’s house because his parents were both too busy with their own lives. But then that’s always been the way with the Nizzutos — they seem to forget everyone else exists unless they happen to be right next to them.

Or sitting in their rearview mirror.

Leonardo grits his teeth every time Primo takes his eyes off the road, which he does often, to glance at the reflection of the miserable figure in the back.

“Don’t get blood on the seats,” Primo says at one point, and the boy fixes him with the kind of furiously defiant look that would have earned anyone else around here a broken jaw. But Primo just sniffs, like he’s trying to inhale whatever powder might be left in his nose, and keeps on driving.

Leonardo isn’t sure what to make of that, isn’t sure what to make of any of this, except that it’s all a goddamn mess, but later, when they’re half way up the hill headed for the old tunnel that the Americans used to use during the war, he watches Primo wash the blood off the boy’s face with the water from a goat trough. And the boy breathes frantically like he’s little more than a frightened animal himself, but they do look at each other, right in the eyes, and Leonardo gets the feeling it doesn’t matter how much English he might have learned, whatever they’re saying to one another is untranslatable.

  
  
  
  
  


Primo doesn’t share his wine, not with Paul, not with his co-conspirators, of all the rules of this mad endeavour, this was one of the first that Paul really committed to memory.

Paul’s aborted escape and Angelo’s death have opened a chasm where before Paul could sometimes fancy they were close enough to touch, to rub elbows at least, as men who wanted similar things and each other, to whatever extent Paul can be considered a man. ( _ He’s a child _ , he’d heard Leonardo snap at Primo once, though Leonardo must have had in mind his age in relation to his current predicament, because it’s obvious he doesn’t know what happened in the old house and it’s better that way.)

Paul is sitting with his knees to his chest longing for a meal that isn’t unidentifiable blobs of canned food when Primo appears, drunk like he used to be, with the noticeable difference that this time around he’s brought the bottle of wine with him, letting it hang from his hand where Paul can reach. 

“What’s the occasion?” Paul asks, trying to hide his initial recoil away from the bottle as if he’d expected Primo to slam it into the side of his head.

_ “Just drink,” _ Primo tells him. At least the order is clear. Paul figures if he’s going to die, he might as well do it drunk on good wine.

(The wine isn’t that good, but after a few swigs from the bottle, the neck slippery under their fingers as they pass it back and forth, he’s reacquainted himself with Primo’s mouth, and Primo’s hands in his hair, and if he keeps looking at him, what he can see of him in the darkness of the tunnel, strands of hair falling in his face and the strong line of his nose and those pale eyes, he can almost forget that a few days ago, there’d been a shotgun pointed straight at his face. Or rather, he can pretend to forget. It’s not like he ever will, and since he can’t, he’ll take this in the meantime, this offering of red wine in exchange for the blood on their hands.)

  
  
  
  
  


It’s stifling in the car, even in the shade under the bridge. Paul feels a little light-headed, perhaps from the wine Leonardo gave him earlier, perhaps from the heat, or maybe the prospect that this is finally almost over. Someone is coming with the money. Someone is coming to take him home.

And yet, even now, Paul wonders what it would be like. Dante is dozing in the passenger seat while Primo drums his fingers on the steering wheel, as he has been doing for the past hour, and Paul wants to reach over and tell him to step on the gas and drive them the hell out of here. Maybe they wouldn’t even have to go as far as Marrakesh, they could hole up in some coastal town somewhere, drinking on the beach under the sun. He would sell paintings to get by. He would eat bread and honey out of Primo’s hands. He would just be Paol.

_ Who are you kidding, Getty?  _ His own fate aside, the only way Primo’s ever going to leave this place is if he burns it down behind him.

And Paul can’t remember the taste of honey. Or peanut butter, or chocolate. He’s been subsisting off vinegary red wine and too-sweet oranges and open mouthed kisses, all he can taste is Calabria now.

Primo lights up a cigarette and reaches back for Paul to take it. His hand lingers for a moment as Paul presses his mouth against his palm, and Paul thinks people are all starving in different ways.

He’s gotten skinnier these last few months, veins too vivid in his wrists, collarbones poking out, light enough now that Primo can lift him up with one arm, like he did only hours before in the old tunnel, with Paul’s long legs wrapped around his waist, saying,  _ “Today you’ll make me rich.”  _ It seemed like they were alone for a long time in the near-darkness, alone enough that Paul — who had, on the spur of the moment, asked a girl to marry him because it seemed like a romantic thing to do — said something foolish and regrettable. The sort of thing you say when you’re sixteen because that’s how people talk in songs. But Primo had his head between Paul’s legs at the time and thankfully didn’t seem to hear. Even if he had, Paul suspects he would have pretended not to understand. The only future tense Primo has ever permitted is the prospect of payment, no matter where his mouth was while Paul was moaning declarations he had no right to make. 

Two months ago, a group of thieves took hostages in a bank in Stockholm, and soon there will be a name for people who feel impossible things in impossible situations. But Paul will always think it wasn’t like that — that instead they were just two people who wanted to be anywhere else with no way of getting there, holding onto each other in the dark.

  
  
  
  
  


For a week, maybe more, he’s hardly conscious, drifting in and out of strange dreams where he curls up inside the trunk of a car, trying to keep away from Angelo’s bloody face and his hands that have curled in death like brittle claws. Whenever he wakes, he can’t make up his mind what’s worse: the dreams inside the trunk, or lying prone in the tunnel, the pain lancing through his head, his mangled ear on fire under the bandage so that he finds himself wishing he could just tear it off, or better, shoot off what remains, extinguishing what little life he’s got left. 

In those moments, Dante and sometimes Leonardo ply him with brandy and he soon drifts off again in some alcohol-induced stupor, which is why it takes him days to realise that he’s not as cold as he used to be, ensconced in warm leather, huddled under the sort of scratchy blankets that usually get passed on to a dog or thrown over a horse. It’s only when the fever finally breaks and the shadows in front of him resolve themselves into a scowling Primo, his impatient voice reaching Paul as if from a distance, that Paul finally gets it, shrugging off the leather jacket as best he can, wondering how long he’s had it and how he came to wear it - feeling a vague sense of regret that he didn’t get to properly enjoy whatever comfort it might have brought him.


	3. After-effects

It would be simple if Paul hated him afterwards, but it’s more complicated than that. One afternoon he writes his name down, as if that will give him some sort of power over… if not the man then at least the word. The idea of him.

What is he supposed to do with the smell of leather and cigarettes, with the scar on Primo’s shoulder, with the fact that he could wrap his thumb and index finger all the way around Paul’s wrist, or that he sometimes twitched in his sleep? What is Paul supposed to do with the knowledge that Primo’s father had nearly drank himself to death, that Primo hated the old man and loved his mother, whose St Christopher he still wears, even though she’d up and left before he was old enough to drive after her? Or that, on certain days, when his mood was right, Primo would permit to be kissed at the juncture of his thighs and like it — they had both liked it?

In the end, Paul does hate him, but not for the reasons he knows he should. He doesn’t even hate him for driving off without him, but for all the things he’s left behind. Too many details that Paul will have to carry with him until he can drink them all away.

  
  
  
  
  


“Who’s Primo?” Martine asks, months later, on a breezy morning as they lie under the olive trees. Paul’s body goes rigid, his eyes casting left and right for an escape, but it’s only Martine and the lazy garden, the empty sky above and the empty fields around them, no criminals in sight, no former lovers, no retribution.

He could say anything he wants. 

“One of the men who took you?” Martine asks, and leans forward on her elbows so that she’ll get a glimpse of his face through the tangle of red curls.

“How did you...” 

“Last night. You spoke in your sleep. It didn’t sound like...”

“Like what?”

“Nothing,” she shrugs. 

She never pushes him to talk about any of it, acknowledging maybe that such a conversation wouldn’t take them anywhere. Paul is grateful for her reluctance, unwilling as he is to confront what her reaction would be. Horror, incomprehension most likely, regardless of what he’d choose to share: the violence, the threat of it and the brutal reality of it; the lure of fitful pleasures, the gradual loss of hope. Shadows creeping in as he waited in that cave - shadows dancing across a wall of light. He can’t drink these days without bringing it all back, but he can’t quite cope with being sober, either.

He can’t remember what it was that he’d dreamt about this time around. It hardly matters.

  
  
  
  
  


Primo has always been one for temporary satisfaction — narcotics highs and fast drives and even faster romances. The kinds of things that can only end messily. Bloodily, even. But that’s the way he was brought up. As far as he’s concerned, there is no permanent state of happiness a man can reach. Nothing that can please you forever.

He’s not sure what he expected, that night he first took the boy down to the barn. He wanted something and he had it, enjoyed having it, and usually that would have been enough to scratch that particular itch for a while. But then he kept coming back, and this seemed to surprise them both. Not the wanting each other — that had been a foregone conclusion from early on, he thinks — but that they both fell into it hungrily again and again, wrapped themselves up in one another in that wretched little house in the hills.

Once, when he was quite drunk, he told Paul a little about his father. Why had he done that? It felt like laying a foundation stone of some sort, and a few hours later he was irritable about it, smashed whatever bottle they were drinking from and went to drive around for a while. Someone like Paul couldn’t understand what he’d been through. (Not an expression he liked much: _been through_. It suggested he had come out on the other side of something, rather than dragging it around like a ball and chain all his life.) But then, when the boy’s own father had failed not once but twice to pay a damn cent to get him back, Primo had been prepared to accept that perhaps Paul did understand a little. The burden of being your father’s son.

He has a son of his own now. Paul, not Primo. Primo wouldn’t dare. But he read a small headline about it in a Roman newspaper when he was last in the capital on business, and he thought _Good,_ meaning that he was glad he didn’t feel anything particular about it. Except perhaps a little sorry for poor Paol, who still hasn’t learnt the lesson Primo has lived all his life: that nothing that makes you happy can ever last.

  
  
  
  
  


Paul paints him from memory, not once but maybe a dozen times, well aware that he shouldn’t be doing it, that the paintings are so many pieces of incriminating evidence that could be used to find and convict Primo, which in turn would put Paul at risk once again. (He’s never been any good at doing what’s good for him, or what he’s been told.) 

Various angles of Primo’s body as he’d glimpsed it in the narrow stream of light that filtered through the broken shutters of the Calati house, and only one portrait where Primo lights a cigarette, a strand of dark hair falling across his face, his eyes lowered, the blue in them muted. Paul doesn’t dare paint his gaze, fears he wouldn’t capture the intensity of it and that he’d corrupt what few memories he has of Primo looking straight at him (amused, angry, aroused, with always a wildness to it, so that meeting his eyes felt like stepping on ice when you’re not sure it’s thick enough to bear your weight.)


	4. Rome '76

They meet again at a club in Rome.

Paul is only here in passing, he’d moved to the US after the birth of his son, but he’s felt an itch to move and here he is, at the end of a whirlwind of art and drugs and spurious connections that felt meaningful at the time and then turned out not to be. He’s left his one-year-old son on the other side of the world with heartfelt promises that he’d return in “a month or two or three,” and two days ago his wife took a plane out of Rome for Germany where he’s due to meet her in a few days. At first, he’d felt a thrill at being in Italy again, but it has subsided somewhat. This particular club is the last place where he thought he’d run into his Calabrian past. 

Primo and him didn’t use to run with the same crowd, Berto’s restaurant aside, but Primo has moved up in the world and now he has the sort of money gets you places, trendy places with ridiculously slender women behind the bar and champagne so expensive you could pave a road for the price of a bottle. Paul meanwhile has no money but he still has a name to trade, and he does gather around him all manners of ruinous, beautiful people, without it being easy to tell if he’s the capsized tanker they gravitate around, or just another bird caught in the oil slick.

“It’s the Getty boy,” someone tells Primo, even though he didn’t ask, and people usually know to stay away from him unless he wants them there. “The one who was kidnapped,” the young man goes on, relishing the gossip.

Primo’s English has only marginally improved, but “Getty boy” and “kidnapped”, he does understand. And it is Paul, there’s hardly any doubt about it, he’d know that tall silhouette anywhere, the narrow waist and the long legs, the wild red curls shorter than they used to be, only just, not so short that he couldn’t get a good fistful of it the way he would have in Calabria, when the sun set on the Calati house and Paul knelt between his legs and looked up at Primo before he touched him, as if there was any question that he’d be allowed to.

“Do you know they cut his ear off?” Primo’s neighbour shouts to be heard above the music.

Primo could leave. It would be safer. He’s never chosen the safer option, however, not once in his life, and if there’s a reason why he should let Paul enjoy himself while he looks for another venue at one in the morning, he can’t find it.

And so he stays - shares a couple lines with his talkative neighbour, and keeps Paul in his line of sight.

Paul who is high and also drunk, dancing like a man possessed, the sort of thing you can only see in Rome where frantic energy isn’t frowned upon. Married Paul who kisses a girl moments after he’s arrived, or lets himself be kissed, who dances in a cluster of people as if he needs them to hold him up.

Primo isn’t merely sitting there waiting to be noticed, he came to this club to meet up with a possible contractor and to snort enough coke that his perception will be reduced to a pulsing kaleidoscope of cold light and discordant sounds. Paul is an additional distraction. A surprise wrapped in clueless arrogance, in unnerving candour.

When their eyes meet, Paul stumbles and rights himself on somebody else, the murmured apology visible at a distance. He glances back up again as if he thinks Primo might have been a hallucination, and Primo stares back, trying to intimate that Paul should leave, with a significant eyebrow raise, a polite gesture towards the door.

Paul’s face is about the clearest expression of teenage rebellion Primo has seen since he last looked in the mirror at nineteen. One hand balled in a nervous fist, chin thrust out: _So what?_

  
  
  
  
  


“It’s you,” Paul says, after Primo has hunted him down (or foolishly followed him) into a bathroom stall, and crowded him against the wall, Paul obligingly wrapping his arms around Primo’s neck, his legs around Primo’s waist. He’s heavier than he was in those days, in the hills and the tunnels, but it’s not altogether uncomfortable, the slight burn in Primo’s muscles, the tangible weight of Paul’s body against his.

“I thought it was someone who looked like you,” Paul explains. “I’ve done that before, actually. I’ve had sex with people who looked like you.”

Primo could tell him he’s tried that too, a quick fuck with a cousin’s girlfriend who happened to have curly hair, a few nights with a tall, willowy young actress desperate for drugs, the occasional exchange of favours with one of his associates who was far better with his hands than Paul used to be, but it wasn’t the same as this, Paul’s rushed breathing against his neck, arms and legs gripping him like a vice as Primo thrusts against him - there’s rarely ever been anything dignified about those moments they’ve shared, and Primo sees no reason why this should change now, as he unfastens his trousers and shoves them down his hips, as Paul turns towards the tiled wall and does the same, and then leans his head upon his arm, that blue drugged-up stare like an invitation, _Get on with it._

It wouldn’t do to linger, not in a place like this. When someone comes in, Paul obligingly bites down on his sleeve, like he might have had to do this before. Afterwards, when Primo is about to leave, Paul smiles at him through his tousled hair, looking remarkably smug considering he has just been fucked without much care, his face pressed up against a wall.

“So it wasn’t just about the money. I wasn’t sure.”

 _“It was... it is,”_ Primo informs him, pushing the hair out of Paul’s face like he had once, in a barn smelling like sheep and mildew. Despite the standing of the club, their current setting is hardly an improvement. Paul Getty, Primo reflects, was made to be fucked in barns. Maybe out in the open, under the sun, where the air smells of hay and herds and ripe fruit. “But I have the money now.”

  
  
  
  
  


They run into each other again a few days later, at a rooftop party held by some two-bit actress, who must know her husband has underworld connections because there’s no way she could afford this place on her own. Primo catches Paul looking at him briefly but they don’t speak. Primo has business to attend to and he can’t afford distractions. The cocaine he snorted off the wrist of the actress’ husband, well that’s just business too.

Two nights after that, Primo walks into the bathroom of an upscale bar and finds Paul with blood on his face, hunched over a sink. The boy is here drinking with some rockstar, or so everyone has been saying, and Paul’s even dressed up for it, in boots and a velvet blazer, he almost looks like someone else. But wherever his famous friends have got to, in the bathroom he is alone, frantically stuffing toilet paper under his nose to try and stem the blood flow.

He pauses when he spots Primo in the mirror and looks miserably at his reflection.

_“What happened to you?”_

“It’s fine, it’s nothing. It just gets like this sometimes.”

Primo thinks Paul looks more familiar with blood on his face.

“It just…” Paul leans against the sink and bites his lip. “It’s a mess.”

Primo nods. He knows what it is. He’s seen it happen to plenty of the people he works with, who inhale cocaine like oxygen.

“Like this,” he says, trying to tilt Paul’s head back, but the boy just screws his face up.

Primo’s never known what to do with him like this. He remembers that drive back from Rosaria’s house, Paul sitting in the back with Angelo’s blood all over him, and how he had tried to wash it off at one point but the boy kept flinching away from him. There were only ever two ways Primo laid a hand on him, and neither of those was to comfort.

Instead he settles on the only form of communication they’ve always understood. 

_“Do you want a cigarette?”_

Paul nods, and while he holds Primo’s cigarette in one shaky hand, he wraps the other around his narrow chest, and the two of them stand in tense silence, until at last he sniffs and says,

“Can you take me somewhere else. Please.”

Primo frowns; he’s not the Gettys’ damn chauffeur, however many times he’s carted Paul around. And he came here with people, he’s got work to do.

“Please, man. I just don’t want to be here anymore.”

He’s looking at Primo the way he had that final time, in the backseat with his head crudely bandaged, the snow and the white sky outside making him seem even paler, those glassy eyes in that sad face, even though by that point he had his freedom and Primo had the money. They were both getting what they wanted, weren’t they? And yet he had hesitated, getting out of the car.

“Paol,” Primo says, and it comes out sounding like an expletive. “Stop bleeding first.”

He drives a better class of car these days, and he’ll be damned if he lets Paul get blood all over this one.

  
  
  
  
  


“How long are you staying?” Paul asks. 

_“Friday.”_

“But it’s already Wednesday.”

_“Yes.”_

“Are you going back to Calabria?” Paul is looking at him in that glassy eyed way, like he used to whenever he wanted a cigarette. “We could—“

“No.”

“Why not?”

_“I have business to do.”_

But Paul must think that means something else, because he frowns and says, “Well my wife isn’t here, is she?”

He’s gotten cocky. Primo doesn’t entirely dislike that. It reminds him of when they first met, the way Paul had curled his lip at him in that field full of sunflowers, not out of disgust so much as some ingrained confidence that he would get what he wanted, because up until that point he always had. Perhaps he has finally grown into a Getty after all.

But it won’t do. Paul reminds him of that quote, about being in the gutter looking up at the stars, or however the hell it goes, but Primo has spent the last year and a half dragging himself out of that gutter. The boy is too much of a liability, drives him mad in all sorts of ways, and that doesn’t mix well with business.

 _“Behave yourself,”_ he warns.

Paul props his elbows up on Primo’s chest, resting his chin in his hands, which has the added benefit of concealing his mouth while he talks, as if he knows he’s about to say something stupid.

“Rome’s so exhausting, I want to see the countryside again. I want wine in the mountains, I want to paint, I want—“

Primo turns him over and pushes his face against the pillow, not so roughly, but the abruptness of it is enough to get the boy to shut up.

 _“Behave,”_ he says, sliding his hand down Paul’s back and pressing his fingers between his legs.

And afterwards, breathing heavily against each other, Paul murmurs, “We should just burn this whole place down with us inside it.”

But he’s already tried that, Primo thinks, remembering the night he spent drinking himself insane at a lonely petrol station in the mountains, waiting to fill up a can of gasoline, and this he does know: the boy is damn hard to kill.

  
  
  
  
  


(“ _Son of a bitch_ ,” Primo whispers to him, like he thinks he’s seen Paul’s little game for what it is.

 _How could that be?_ Paul wonders. _I don’t even know what game I’m playing._ It’s always been like this, impulsive cons that he never thinks all the way through, although he’s got an inkling that maybe he hadn’t been trying to play Primo, this time around. Maybe he’d just been trying to play himself.

“You can insult me again,” he ventures, and repeats it in his shaky Italian. Primo never obeys any orders outright, but there is often a middle ground to be found, where his desires and Primo’s pride can meet unchecked.

“ _Son of a bitch_ ,” Primo repeats, lower still, but already his tone has changed, and Paul parts his legs so Primo can sink against him.)

  
  
  
  
  


_“If you’re here when I come back, maybe...”_ Primo says. “ _From Calabria,”_ he elaborates, when Paul just blinks lazy eyes at him, sprawled on his stomach on the hotel bed, ashtray and lit cigarette at his elbow. 

The lines of him are tempting enough that Primo briefly considers removing the clothes he’s just put back on to join him on the bed. Hands in Paul’s hair, voice in turn menacing and cajoling as Paul rubs himself blindly against the bedsheets, head turned to the side. Always he presents the scarred side of his face, like those animals that gently place their head on the block and wait for the blade that’ll sever it from their body. 

Boys like Paul don’t survive vast expanses of nothing, the staggering heat, the rusty farm implements, the knife in your hand at eleven, slicing a sheep’s throat at twelve, a carotid artery at fourteen as the man beneath you thrashes vainly, his face submerged in mud or silt.

Boys like Paul only make it to adulthood because of the beauty of their fiery hair, of eyes the colour of a clear winter sky, slender palms that were made to be kissed, narrow hips that were meant to bear the imprint of a lover’s bruising hands. Primo doesn’t know how to love anyone but himself, had long prided himself, in fact, for having never loved anyone but his absent mother (whose hands he’d fervently kissed as a child and then as a wayward teenager) and the graceful statue of the Virgin Mary he prayed to in the village of his childhood, with her flaking golden halo and the glass tears on her pale cheeks. In the meantime he grew up to fuck people whose names he didn’t care to learn, provided they were good-looking and willing and as high as he was, and it worries him, that he fell asleep with his head in Paul’s lap the night before like other men would have with their girlfriend or wife, that Paul had stroked his hair and Primo hadn’t knocked away his hand.

It confuses him that three years ago they’d cut of a lock of Paul’s hair to send along with his severed ear and he’s kept part of it, knows precisely in which pocket of which leather jacket he’s kept it, because he wears that jacket to meetings where he’ll be in dire need of a lucky charm.

 _“If you’re here when I come back,”_ he repeats. Pulls on his jacket and shrugs. _“Maybe.”_

“When you come back,” Paul repeats. “Okay.”

  
  
  
  
  


When Primo does come back, two weeks later, Paul is long gone from Rome. Primo doesn’t look for him, but he hears someone say that the Getty boy has left for Munich, or maybe London, or New York, or Los Angeles. Primo shrugs it off like he used to shrug off his father’s backhanded slaps, his mouth twisted in a grim smile, his fingers itching for a trigger.

  
  
  
  
  


Paul knows how to keep things to himself when he wants or needs to. All that he tells Marcello when Marcello catches him staring dreamy-eyed into the distance is that “No, nothing’s up.” 

“It’s not like that”, he adds, when Marcello ventures to ask what Martine would think, even though they both know that Martine wouldn’t care as long as Paul is less withdrawn and sulky than when she saw him last - anything that makes him happy she’ll take in stride.

Marcello looks at Paul the way Angelo used to sometimes, which makes him feel guilty and indignant all at once – the kind of look that could be accompanied by something like _Don't be so naive, Paul_ or _What exactly do you think is going to happen here?,_ but Marcello just shakes his head instead and pours him another glass of wine. It's easier to be around Paul these days when he's drunk.

(Marcello who’d got the barest glimpse of Primo as he left the hotel ahead of Paul some days ago and who doesn’t have any inclination to get a better look at him, ever. The kind of man who looks like he eats knives, who'd get you off with one hand while he puts a bullet in your head with the other.)

Paul’s never been good at waiting and lately, he’s been finding it hard to stay more than a minute in the same place. It’s a way of drinking and running to stay ahead of ruined hopes, of failed expectations, or maybe it’s none of that. Sometimes he just doesn’t have it in himself to think things through. So he drinks the last of the wine and snorts what little coke Primo left, and he puts Rome behind him.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


The next time Primo sees Paul is in a film, some bit part in a Polanski movie that’s already a few years old by the time they decide to show it at the little Art Deco cinema the next town over from the dusty nowhere valley where Primo grew up. He’d had no real desire to go; for the past few years there’s been trouble in the region due to his uncle’s poor management of squabbling contractors, and suddenly it seems entirely his responsibility to bring all of Calabria to heel. But he and Leonardo are entertaining a potential Sicilian investor (already past his prime, Primo thinks, like most Sicilian gangsters) who could be of use if things turn bad, and the old man was eager to see the area, and so here they are, sitting at the front of a stuffy little movie theatre where Primo had once received a lousy handjob when he was fifteen, and suddenly Paul is smoking in the background of a scene, ten feet tall on the wall in front of him. 

It’s a version of Paul from a time before Primo knew him; he can tell from the way he holds himself, a languid easiness that Primo has only seen since in those brief moments after they’d finished fucking but before they really inhabited themselves again, and Paul would lie there, be it on some grotty farmhouse mattress or the backseat of Primo’s car or a luxurious bed in Rome, and smile up at him sleepily like all was right with the world.

Primo slips out of the cinema and smokes a whole carton of cigarettes in his car, waiting for the film to end. He feels like he’s been here before, smoking and waiting, and always it’s to do with Paul. He feels like he’s nobody again, just Salvatore’s nephew, and he tells himself he’ll remember feeling like this when he—if he—ever sees that boy again.


	5. Rome '78

When he does it’s hardly momentous, and Primo feels almost cheated by it. Not that he’s thought about it often, them running into each other again — he’s a businessman now, and no longer bothers with improbabilities — but on rare occasions he did let himself remember how suddenly vast and empty Rome had seemed the day he came back to find Paul gone, and at such times he’d found himself thinking that if they were to meet again, it should be at twenty paces with a pistol each. But no, here Paul is, just sitting on the edge of a fountain, writing something in a notebook. His hair is a few inches shorter, but not as short as it was in a magazine Primo saw a few months ago, when Paul had sold one of his paintings to Andy Warhol in New York, and he is leaner than when Primo last saw him, two years ago, but he holds himself differently, as though he has finally grown into his long limbs. He looks up when Primo’s shadow falls over him, squinting momentarily in the afternoon sunlight, and Primo can see that he has not been sleeping well. But in that quiet way of his Paul says, “Oh it’s you” as if he has simply been sat here waiting all this time.

  
  
  
  
  


If Primo has made a point of not thinking about it, Paul has been the opposite.

He gets easily distracted these days. It seems like there is always something to do, and whenever he mentions this to his New York friends, they say “Oh yeah, kids can be a nightmare at that age,” and it takes a moment before it occurs to him they’re referring to his son. But at night he will sit out on the balcony with his bare feet up on the rail, smoke a cigarette or two, and the only thing his mind seems to want to focus on is a seemingly endless reel of scenarios in which he and Primo meet again. Even those, he struggles to keep coherent. Sometimes he’ll be picturing the two of them in bed together, in some hotel far more expensive than he could ever afford, kissing his way along Primo’s jaw, Primo’s fingers leaving bruises on his hips just the way he likes it… and then suddenly he’ll think _Scrap that. Unrealistic,_ and move onto something else. A bottle of wine between them in a disreputable bar, perhaps. Or Primo pushing him up against sun-warmed stone in an empty piazza. (Or, as he once thought _very_ indulgently, Primo somewhere in New York, maybe in the autumn, when the light is best, and Paul snapping polaroids of him in Central Park when he isn’t looking. Talk about unrealistic.) But in none of these scenarios does Paul ever imagine for a moment that Primo wouldn’t want him back.

So when, by that fountain in Rome, Primo rolls his shoulders and gives him that black-eyed stare that Paul remembers all too well, the kind of look that says he’d like to set something on fire, and says “ _Who the fuck do you think I am?”,_ Paul is too startled to get up and chase after him when Primo strides away.

  
  
  
  
  


(That train of thought about polaroids in Central Park was one he knew better than to indulge, but it hadn’t come entirely out of nowhere. At the Calati house, Dante had had a polaroid camera. Paul had only seen it twice — once when they took a photograph of him to send to an Italian newspaper, and the second time when Dante returned from the river with an especially large trout, grinning with pride and demanding that Angelo take a picture.

Not a wise thing to have, a camera, when you’re trying to stay anonymous. But then a lot of the things that happened that summer weren’t wise. 

They left the camera out on the stone steps when they took the fish inside, within reach of Paul, who was using a little rock to scratch a crude drawing of the horizon onto a paving slab. Some yards away, Primo was leaning on the hood of his car, smoking lazily, having just finished prodding around in the engine, and he had smears of oil on his arms. He looked pleased with himself, but not in the mocking way he directed at other people — this was a private sort of satisfaction, as if he didn’t realise Paul was watching him.

Looking back, it’s not exactly the moment Paul would have chosen to immortalise, if he’d had to pick one, but at the time his hands had itched to reach for the polaroid camera. Preserve some proof that this man was really there, and just as privately human as the rest of them.

But then Dante re-emerged from the house and gathered the camera up, told Paul to come inside and see the fish before they sliced into it. He did not ask Primo, Paul noted. And when Paul glanced over again, Primo was eyeing them, looking like he usually did, which is to say on the outside of things.)

  
  
  
  
  


Five years ago, Primo would have shot him for such an offence. Or maybe he wouldn’t have. Paul is probably reading too much into the fact that he never did - all in all, it came down to the flipping of a coin, or rather, to the people who chose to step in the bullet’s path. 

It’s hardly worth debating the question, besides, because Paul has already decided that he will take the risk of being shot. Something about Primo’s long legs when he’d stopped in front of Paul at the fountain, or about his smell (Paul can tell he was trying to smell sophisticated, there was definitely a whiff of cologne there, but mostly and aside from cigarette smoke, Primo still smells of Calabria).

If he wants to summon him, Paul assumes that he must appeal to the one thing they still have in common. So he throws a large party at the house of a wealthy diplomat’s son, and tells his dealer to provide the guests with coke, “the best you can find, make sure your suppliers know who’s asking for it.”

Paul hardly knows the host, a friend and former lover of Martine’s. The guests are his usual crowd of up-and-coming artists, and he moves among them asking polite questions about this novel draft and that screenplay, about exhibitions and auctions and summer holidays in French country houses, and he poses for impromptu sketches and elaborate tableaux in full costume, and declines to take part in an orgy in the orangery. By the time Primo does appear, Paul is too tired to think straight or perhaps to think at all, walking around on a potent cocktail of wine and coke that has put a spring in his step and made his hands itch, so that upon seeing Primo, and having ascertained that it is him (walking like his whole body is on display but reaching for it might cost you your hands), Paul just stumbles forward, “Ah, you made it,” and kisses him right there in the hallway, with a hand on Primo’s shoulder, the other one between his legs.

  
  
  
  
  


Primo figures it out the moment he steps through the door and sees the boy, with feathers in his hair like a 1920s flapper, smiling like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, and he barely has time to think _You little shit_ before Paul has his arms around his neck.

There’s something about the way Paul kisses, like he’s still sixteen and eager and a little clumsy all at once. For a moment they could be anywhere, in the private dark of that old barn, or the bedroom where they’d learned each other’s bodies like poetry in Braille, and perhaps that’s why Primo allows himself to sink into it briefly, one hand gripping Paul’s hip because he’s never been able to kiss him, kiss anyone, without asserting himself. 

But then Paul pulls away, still looking utterly delighted, and they are very definitely not in Calabria, but one of those kinds of parties that Primo adores rich people for, the kind that would make the old Romans envious, where folks are living like they don’t care if it kills them.

“Andiamo,” Paul says, tugging at the lapels of his jacket. “You want a drink?”

What Primo wants is to put his hands around the boy’s throat, bury him face down in silk sheets and pillows, and then bury him again, in six feet of dirt. He’s always worn his anger on his sleeve, and backed up his glares and threats with bullets and bloody knuckles, but Paul just sighs and says, “It’s a party. Be mad at me tomorrow, but you can enjoy yourself tonight, right?” and Primo doesn’t stop him when he leans in to kiss him again. Never learned to say no to the things that aren’t good for him.

They drink champagne and absinthe and smoke cigars from Havana, and at one point in the night, Paul tilts his head to the side so that Primo can snort a line of coke off his neck. It takes him a minute to realise something’s different, as he sweeps that chaotic tangle of hair back, and Paul smiles softly, looks away as though he’s embarrassed.

_“Your ear.”_

“Yeah… It’s okay, I guess. I mean, it looks better anyway.”

Primo thinks that’s one way of putting it. You might not even realise it’s all plastic if you didn’t already know what had happened, but he doubts there’s a man or woman in Italy who hasn’t heard what became of Paul Getty’s ear. 

So why bother fixing it at all?

It reminds him of those old paintings, painted over and obscured because the artist wanted to save canvas, or to hide some grisly scene unwanted by their benefactor. Demons and dying men turned into trees and vases because it pleased the eye. Perhaps that’s how Paul’s wife felt about it.

By the time they end up in bed, Primo is so out of his own head that he’s almost entirely forgotten about Paul’s ear, so it may be that one that he mutters strings of curses and breathless Italian praise into, but if it is then there’s no deeper meaning to it.

Paul fucks like he seems to do everything else these days, like he’s got a fever that he’s trying to sweat out. He falls asleep quickly afterwards, for which Primo is grateful. He didn’t relish whatever conversation Paul might have had planned — no doubt more sentiments about how he’d like to paint the Calabrian coastline, or how great Morocco is this time of year. But as he watches the boy, sprawled in the tangle of some stranger’s bedsheets, his mind wanders back once again to that dim little room in the Calati house where they used to cling to each other, intimate as lovers, or as two people who have buried a body together.

  
  
  
  


Paul gets a good twelve hours of sleep, in no small part because Primo glares at anyone who dares try to come inside the bedroom, whether it’s drunken revellers or the owner of the house, who was apparently under the impression that he would get something out of Paul. Sexual favours or drugs, Primo doesn’t know, but he sells the flaky youth some overpriced coke before he ushers him out with a whispered threat about missing body parts, as the boy casts a look back at where Paul is sleeping face down on the bed, all long limbs and tanned skin, the feathers in his hair fluttering in the breeze from the open window.

Primo should kill him, that much is obvious. He had no cause to regret letting him go after they got the money; it was the right decision from a business perspective, but he should have dispatched Paul from the moment they ran into each other again. It wouldn’t be much of a threat to their reputation this time around. People would say that Paul was looking for trouble, that he shouldn’t have come back to Italy.

Primo sits down on the bed, thinking that maybe he’ll get himself something as ridiculously lavish, with a headboard of solid oak sculpted into birds and vines and sheets so soft that Paul has sunk several inches into them. It would only be for show. He has a house now, but he rarely ever spends a night there. When he does, it’s because he has passed out on a chair or couch, with a weapon inches away from his hand.

Paul is sleeping soundly enough that Primo touches two fingers to his neck to check for a pulse. It would be the easiest thing, to hold a pillow against the boy’s head and pull the trigger. Primo never goes without a gun these days. Paul knows it, it was the same two years ago, and whenever his hands used to come in contact with it, stroking Primo’s back, easing Primo’s trousers off his hips, Primo would feel him go tense, though Paul tried to hide it and they never said anything about it. Paul always forgot fast enough. Hasn’t changed, it would seem. Doesn’t want to remember that Primo is a criminal even as he gets turned on by the idea.

Paul cornered him so fast when he arrived at this party that it’s unlikely other people paid him much attention, apart from the boy with the coke, who’ll know better than to talk about it. Somehow the party hasn’t ended yet, even though it’s about seven in the morning. The music would drown out whatever noise the pillow doesn’t.

And yet Primo hesitates, the pillow in one hand and the gun in the other, as the sun begins to rise above the rooftops and church spires and the empty piazza below. Perhaps he could force his own hand.

Leaning down, he murmurs in Paul’s ear.

“Mm?” Paul says, shifting against the embroidered bedspread. Then, more clearly, “What?”

“Nizzuto,” Primo repeats. “Primo Nizzuto.”

Paul’s eyes are bright and clear in the morning light, a startling blue that Primo’s only ever seen in water holes in Calabria. Paul looks at the gun in Primo’s hand. He doesn’t move.

Primo also looks down at the gun. Then he slips it back inside his trousers and smooths his jacket over it, and runs a hand down his face.

“Cigarette?” Paul suggests, his voice quiet like he’s still not quite awake yet, or like maybe the adrenaline has left his body so fast it took his breath away with it.

 _“Do you have any?”_ Primo asks, casting a dubious look at Paul’s discarded clothing.

“I can find some,” Paul says, reaching down for his trousers. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.” He looks around for his shoes and promptly gives up. “I’ll be right back,” he repeats, and leans in to kiss Primo swiftly on the mouth.

  
  
  
  
  


This time it is Primo who leaves before Paul returns, and he spends the rest of the day drinking and picking fights with people he won’t mind punching or stabbing or killing if the need arises, anything that will help him forget - if only for a moment - that instead of shooting Paul in the head, he’d as good as knelt at his feet and placed the gun in his hands.

  
  
  


Paul arrives back upstairs with a crushed carton of cigarettes that he stole from a man sleeping half naked on a polar bear skin rug, only to find the bedroom empty, and he thinks, _Well okay, that one’s on you, Getty._

It’s a large house, there are plenty of ways Primo could have left, but Paul is a romantic sort and rather fancies he might have climbed out of the window. It’s a roguish image, only slightly dulled by the fact that Primo had been holding a gun when Paul woke up. There could have been any number of reasons for that, he tells himself. _Okay, no there couldn’t._

He flops back onto the bed with a sigh. One of these days that man really is going to shoot him. Paul should know that better than anyone; it’s not like he hasn’t seen Primo do it before.

And yet, Paul had kissed him, just minutes ago. There was a time when Primo might have put a gun to his head just for that. (Kissing was alright before they fucked, it seemed, but not immediately afterwards, as though it implied some intention to repeat what they’d just done, and in those early days Primo seemed insistent it was a one-and-done sort of deal, even after the fourth time.)

“Jesus, what a mess,” he says aloud to the ceiling, and he’s not sure if he’s talking about Primo, or the situation, or maybe just himself. Whenever they’re together he feels like he’s living on borrowed time, but then maybe that’s why he’s always so eager to make the most of it. To make the most of being wanted for a little while. And what now? He’ll go back to being someone’s son, someone’s husband, someone’s father, but not himself. The time ahead of him feels like a long corridor with nothing on the walls.

(In the end, it is not so long after all.)

  
  
  
  
  


Paul goes out drinking with Marcello and gets into a fight with a man who claims the latter owes him money. Paul has no doubt that’s true, but he’s in one of his moods where a kick in the teeth feels about as good as a shot of brandy or a bump of coke. Marcello gets an elbow to the face and passes out cold, but Paul staggers around a little while longer, getting a split lip and a black eye for his trouble, and there’s a brief second, as the guy pulls his fist back to take another swing at his face, when Paul says, “No, wait—” and wonders why he hadn’t said that to Primo, standing over him with his gun the morning after the party. Then there’s the sudden sound of glass shattering, and Paul has to scramble aside to avoid the man falling forwards onto him. One of his eyes is swollen shut and he has to squint with the other to see anything in the little piazza, lit only by the secondhand light from surrounding windows, but once you’ve learned someone’s silhouette in the dark, you’d know them anywhere.

Primo mutters, _“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”_ and Paul isn’t sure if he’s talking to him, or the man lying at their feet with shards of broken wine bottle glinting in the back of his head.

  
  
  
  
  


Paul squints with his good eye at the peeling wallpaper, the crucifix above the TV, the old sewing catalogues stacked under the coffee table the way Paul’s wealthy family probably has books about modern art or American politics. “ _You live here?_ ”

Primo scoffs. It’s his aunt’s place, or it was. His, now, he supposes. He’d wanted to move her somewhere better, somewhere cleaner, but she wouldn’t have anything to do with him after what happened to Stefano. _Fifty_. (She knew it was Primo who did for him, the way old women always know; they don’t kneel down to pray at night so much as sit down for coffee with the Holy Mother like two friends sharing gossip.) Then back in ‘75, when there was trouble in Calabria, some genius got it into his head to break into the old lady’s apartment and shoot her while she slept, and Primo had hunted him down and strung him up in the town square to bleed out like a butchered goat. He paid for a funeral far bigger than his aunt would have wanted, but not nearly as big as she deserved.

He doesn’t tell Paul any of that. Let the boy think they’ve broken into some stranger’s empty home; whatever fantasy pleases him best.

“Thanks, man,” Paul says, when Primo hands him a towel heavy with warm water to press against his swollen eye. “Thanks for…yeah.”

Primo waves him away. He’s still on the fence about whether or not he wants to kill Paul, but he certainly wasn’t about to let someone else do it. That’s his shot, always has been. He’s the only one who gets to take it.

“ _He made a mess of your pretty face, eh?_ ” he says, leaning back on the sofa with his arms crossed. “ _At least he didn’t ruin your new ear_.”

Paul looks at him sharply like he’s on the verge of telling him to shut up, which Primo would like to see. You push the right buttons and every so often you get a glimpse of the bratty little rich kid underneath (which, Primo will admit to no one but himself, was who he thought he was fucking that first night he leaned Paul up against the barn door).

But instead Paul just flops onto the sofa, curling up his long, tired limbs so that he and Primo aren’t touching, but they could be, if one of them moved just so. “Do you ever feel like you’re not…” The adrenaline of the evening seems to have sobered him up some, but he still slurs through his words, his California drawl not making his speech any clearer, and Primo doesn’t really understand what he’s saying, except that he mentions his father.

 _Do we all become our fathers_ , is that it?

 _No,_ Primo thinks, and refuses to hear any more of it, kicking at Paul’s legs with his boot. “ _Enough_.”

“Hey, alright, alright, don’t be such a jerk.” Paul pouts at him with his busted lip, but then he’s grinning, laughing almost, and Primo thinks he must be more drunk than he’d realised.

“ _What is it now?_ ” he snaps, as Paul sinks down into the sofa cushions, still smiling like a madman, blood on his teeth.

“You saved my life, man. You did, you really did. I mean, in mafia terms, we’re practically engaged.”

Paul can tell that Primo hasn’t understood the joke, but that’s probably for the best. Folding the towel over he presses it back onto his eye and licks his bloody lip. There’s something about this apartment that unsettles him. Maybe it’s to do with Primo and how little he knows about him; he has no idea what kind of place Primo would be at home in - until now he’d assumed it was his car, or noisy clubs, or hotel rooms, places that have something urban about them because Primo seems to crave that veneer of sophistication that money can bring over comfort and homeliness. It’s surprising to find him here in an interior better suited for an old lady and a cat and balls of yarn.

Maybe it’s to do with what he does know about Primo: his remorselessness, his cruelty. He must have killed the apartment’s previous owner. The atmosphere of this stuffy little Roman interior reminds him of the houses he’d broken into with Angelo back in Calabria, the way they’d all seemed to have been abandoned only minutes ago, and this in turn makes him think of Angelo himself (their feet touching on the train under the canopy of trees, the blooming hope of early friendships - Angelo accepting Paul’s shoes with a stubborn but grateful nod). The realisation is as abrupt as it is necessary - Paul knows he can’t return to Calabria. Maybe he’s found the limit beyond which drugs and alcohol won’t soak up his denial.

 _“What is it?”_ Primo asks, and of course he sounds annoyed about it. It strikes Paul now that he’s learned to take Primo’s annoyance as an improvement over his murderous impulses and be stupidly thankful for it.

“Can we just fuck?” he asks, mutinous, and sees something in Primo’s reflexive grimace of a smile that he’d never seen before, something like an impact wound. “Scopare?” he insists, and shifts around on the couch so he’ll be leaning against the armrest as he struggles to open his jeans.

Primo has a callous shrug, _Why not?_ , and whatever hides behind it, Paul isn’t privy to it.

 _Maybe there’s nothing_ , he thinks, aware that in all likelihood, he’s being more spiteful than he has any right to be. _He could be richer than a Getty, he could smoke all the cigarettes in the world, snort enough coke to choke on it, have sex with all the beauty money can buy - kill as many people as he wants to, set their bodies on fire and dance in the ashes - and it still wouldn’t make him feel a thing._

In the midst of it, knees pushed up against his chest, head thrown back on the armrest of some dead person’s couch, Primo fucking him with his leather jacket still on, teeth bared against Paul’s neck, the lie becomes difficult to uphold, troubling as the truth may be. Paul’s usually too wrapped up in his own familiar tangle of pleasure and discomfort to pay much attention to whatever Primo is saying, but he does catch fragments of it this time, enough to know that Primo thinks he’s more beautiful than a statue in church and that if it were up to him Paul would always be on his back with his legs over Primo’s shoulders, that in the years since the kidnapping it has kept him up at night sometimes, the memory of Paul’s frantic breathing, that final gasp, never Primo’s name, just,

“You bastard,” Paul groans, as Primo’s body goes tense in his arms, and they’ve made a mess of the couch, but he can’t quite bring himself to care, blissed out, his mouth aching, blood on his tongue from his split lip.

 _“Better?”_ Primo asks from where he’s slumped against Paul’s chest, the hint of irony almost smothered by the exhaustion in his voice.

“Yeah,” Paul answers, tentative fingers brushing against Primo’s shoulders, climbing upwards into his hair. _“Much better.”_

It’s not quite a lie - it might even be the sorry truth.

  
  
  
  
  


A memory, or a dream perhaps, because when he wakes Primo does not really remember it happening — his mother lying down on the bed beside him, the familiar dip of the mattress under her weight. “ _It’ll be alright_ ,” she says, putting her arm over his shoulders, and he is taller than her by this point but she pulls him close as though he is still a child. “ _My wild boy, it’ll be alright_.” You have no sense of smell in dreams, or so they say (that seems like something Paul would know; perhaps he was the one who told him), but Primo knows she smelled of soap and faintly of church candles, so maybe it is a memory after all. He doesn’t turn over to look at her face, though. He knows he has all but forgotten it, and he’s seen enough faces of grieving mothers these last few years to worry what his subconscious will replace it with.

His neck is stiff when he wakes, having slept at an odd angle on the sofa, right on the edge as if leaving space for someone else. For his mother or Paul, it doesn’t matter; there is nobody there now, and at first he assumes the boy has simply run off again.

A thud from the bedroom makes him reach for his gun, fallen to the floor in the haste of jerking his trousers over his thighs (he’d been so hungry for him, even with Paul’s messed up face and his bitter voice, had wanted to hold onto him tight enough to leave the imprints of his hands on the boy’s hips, and he’s always been careful about crime scenes, always liked to burn the evidence, but with Paul he feels a need to leave his fingerprints, as if to say _I was here. Come and get me._ ) But then a familiar voice from the next room says, “Shit”, and Primo gets to his feet with a sigh, leaving the gun on the coffee table.

In the bedroom Paul has dropped a picture frame and the glass has cracked. Primo frowns, snatching it out of his hands.

Paul tenses like he’s expecting something more. Another black eye. “I was just looking.”

Primo sets the picture back gently on his aunt’s dressing table. “ _It’s none of your business_.”

“Is that you?”

So he got a good look then. The group of children who had clambered together so gleefully for a photograph in the ruin of some uncle’s house, the stonework blasted to pieces by the Americans when they’d swept through Italy several years before. There had been more of them then. A whole generation who were supposed to carry the future on their backs, most dead and buried before the age of twenty-five, lost to drink or drugs or brutal husbands, until it was only him and Stefano left. And now just him.

“ _Is that you?_ ” Paul repeats, as if he thought maybe Primo hadn’t understood the first time, and Primo thinks the boy may as well be looking at him naked. He’s always preferred these small safehouses to the grand place he bought in Calabria—fewer entry points to watch, a layout you can learn by heart, only a finite number of places where someone might lie in wait to get the drop on him—and yet that’s exactly how he feels now. The boy has been catching him off guard too often lately, another bad habit that neither of them need.

“ _Get out of here_ ,” he mutters, but he’s too tired to put any real bite into it, and Paul can tell, he’s looking at him curiously. Not gently, necessarily – when is it ever like that with them? – but as though it surprises him that Primo might have been a child at all.

Arguably he never really was. Held a man’s face to the ground while he choked to death under him when he was only fourteen. How do you stay young after that?

“I don’t have any cigarettes.” Paul sounds wary, like maybe he’s finally catching up on a lesson he should have learnt years ago. “Otherwise I’d… you know.” He rubs a hand over his face, saying, “I should go” and Primo doesn’t try to stop him as he heads for the door.

It was a dream he’d had about his mother. He’s sure of that now.

_It’ll be alright._

She would have known better than to lie like that.

  
  
  
  
  


As Marcello orders another bottle of wine, Paul tallies up his worldly possessions : a plane ticket back to the States in one pocket, for a flight a week from now; a few crumpled bills and coins in the other; a suitcase that he’s left under a friend’s bed containing far too few changes of clothes; a notebook open on the table, its pages full of scribbles for another film he’ll never make; and Primo’s last name, sitting like a stone on the back of his tongue. 

“Isn’t there something in fairy tales, about what you can do with a fairy’s name?” he wonders out loud. 

They haven’t had a proper meal in 24 hours. Paul is quite sure Marcello’s nose wasn’t so crooked the night before, when he’d taken that elbow to the face. Meanwhile he still can’t see anything out of his left eye, but the artist friend whose house he’s currently occupying has fashioned him an eyepatch out of a piece of black velvet.

Marcello stares at him unblinkingly.

“What?”

“In fairy tales,” Paul repeats. “If you know a fairy’s real name, you have power over them.”

“Is that where you were last night? Calling fairies by their names? Was she green, that fairy, by any chance?”

Paul rolls his eyes at him. Marcello’s hand shoots out before he can think to knock it away, pulling up his shirt, only just, baring his stomach and the purplish fingerprints along his ribs.

“They’ve got strong hands, your fairies,” Marcello says. “Maybe you should tell them to be a little kinder to you.”

  
  
  
  
  


The flight back to New York is creeping closer, the prospect of it and all the responsibilities awaiting him on the other end looming over him as he sleeps (alone, on his artist friend’s couch, trying not to think about the last time he spent the night on a sofa, his head resting on Primo’s arm, feeling the man’s breath against his cheek as he muttered in his sleep). He gives up after the third night and takes to sitting on the rooftop scribbling down scraps of poetry, or trying to sketch the Roman skyline as the sun rises, or wandering the streets looking for parties to slip into and coke to score without paying for it.

He is generally welcome at parties. People are glad to see him in the same way they would be glad if a guest brought flowers or a bottle of wine — no one expects him to do anything, but he’s sort of decorative. He runs into his old photographer friend Nicolò, who has moved on from photographing naked millionaires to urban street art and now has an upcoming exhibit in Berlin, which Paul promises to go to knowing full well he’ll forget. Nicolò is a better photographer than he used to be but he’s the same lousy kisser as he always was, and Paul grows tired of it quickly, especially when Nicolò asks if Paul could introduce him to some of his influential artistic friends in New York. Always the same. No one ever wants him, it’s just about what he can do for them.

It’s the same back home, even with his mother, he thinks as he drifts from rowdy house party to rooftop soirée to uptown disco. His mother wants him to be happy, and every day that he isn’t she seems to take this as a personal offence, blaming herself for all the things that have gone wrong in his life. It gets tiring, telling her she’s wrong, that his unhappiness is his own. He is so tired of it all.

He’s two lines and half a bottle of wine in when a thought occurs to him and he is too high to beat it back: arguably Primo doesn’t ask anything of him. Not anymore. He got what he wanted out of Paul, all five million dollars of it, but he still comes around, and for what? He could get sex from anyone, probably does. So, what, just to tell him he’s beautiful when he thinks Paul can’t hear, to whisper his name in his ear in the morning, to leave him with that like he’s supposed to know what to do with it?

“Do you know Primo?” he asks the woman sitting next to him, cutting their cocaine. “Primo Nizzuto?”

She shrugs. She’s higher than he is, pupils blown out black. Paul shakes his head. “Never mind.”

In folklore, any gift from the fairies is a double-edged sword, like knowing Primo’s name is a burden to him now, one he wants to be rid of, to pass it on to somebody else. He brings it up again at the next party he finds himself at, and again the night after that, for the rest of the week, asking anyone with coke, even though he doubts Primo associates with two-bit street dealers these days, even the classier ones who overcharge.

The day before his flight, his artist friend lets him tag along to the after-party of his latest exhibition’s opening night. Paul is mildly delighted by the champagne fountain, less so by having to wear shoes. He stumbles around in the pair of cowboy boots that Mick Jagger’s wife gave him for his eighteenth birthday, chatting to artists and people with more money than sense, even agreeing to collaborate with someone whose name he doesn’t catch.

He drinks a lot and says, “Hey, do you know Primo Nizzuto?” The artists shake their heads. Paul sighs, “Yeah, well. You should.”

He spills more champagne on the floor and other people than he gets near his mouth. He decides to call it a night, to stagger back to the flat to try and catch a bit of sleep before the ten hours to New York tomorrow, but the stairs down to the exit are rammed with people coming the other way and he has to elbow his way past. Someone grabs hold of his arm and he turns round with a withering look that he figures would have made even his grandad proud, only to find Primo frowning at him.

“ _Leaving already?_ ”

Paul stares at him, and all he can think is, _I spoke your name and summoned you._

“ _What are you doing here?_ ” Paul manages, once Primo’s all but hauled him back to the top of the stairs and smoothed out the creases left by his hand in Paul’s velvet blazer. They stand across from each other with the veneer of two civilised people. “ _You don’t even like art_.”

Primo raises his eyebrows. “No.” He looks unimpressed, as though Paul is being remarkably slow. “ _But you do. And I heard you were looking for me_.”

“I’m going to show you something,” Paul decides. Making to grab Primo’s sleeve, he finds his hand instead, and pulls him back into the crowd on the landing, through double doors and onto the gallery overlooking the atrium. “This house belongs to a German art collector,” he explains. “I mean, now it does. I came here two years ago and it was used by the French embassy for its diplomats...”

Primo has long shaken off his hand and is walking through the small groups of rich patrons and aesthetically destitute artists like he has murder on his mind. Murder or money, which Paul assumes has to be the same thing when you’re the head of a criminal organisation. Sometimes Primo’s eyes alight on him with that same manic intensity and Paul can’t help feeling like he’s tossed a coin down into the atrium and is waiting to see on which side it will land, a bullet to the head or a rushed handjob in the art collector’s pristine bathroom. One day his luck is bound to run out - unless he’s got it all wrong and the game is rigged. Maybe it’s the same picture on both sides, only in reverse - maybe it’s been for a while now - heads is Paul on his knees, tails is Primo, the round outline of the coin providing them with a golden halo.

Paul equips them with flutes of champagne, doesn’t comment when Primo tosses his back like it’s a glass of cheap wine, spills his own on the boots that have been chafing his calves ever since he put them on. 

“In here,” he says, his hand light on Primo’s back, inches away from the gun strapped to his belt.

The room is guarded by some angry-looking guy in a dark suit, whose instructions probably boil down to “don’t let people throw food at the artworks”. In Paul’s experience, it’s often those stern guards who have the best anecdotes about the art, not the collectors and their friends and protégés, and he gives the man a guileless smile as Primo does a bump of coke in the middle of the sitting-room.

“Here!” Paul drags him in front of a bright red canvas lit from above by a strip of neon. The artwork is at odds with the rest of the room, the green fronds and varnished wood and yellow silk upholstery. Primo raises his eyebrows at him. _How long has it been since you last slept?_ Paul wonders, as the neon throws Primo’s shadowed eyes in sharp relief.

“It’s an Italian artist,” Paul explains. “Fontana. He made this ten years ago. Dieci... Dieci anni fa. He’s dead now. The cuts... He was trying to say something about space? And there’s strips of black gauze behind the canvas so that when he slashes the painting, you get a glimpse of... of shadows. Of depth. _I thought... I thought you’d like it_ ,” he says, because he can’t quite bring himself to say, _Slashes on a blood-red canvas, it made me think of you._

Judging from Primo’s expression, his mouth down-turned but his eyes riveted on the canvas, Paul thinks he might not have scored wildly off the mark.

 _“How much?”_ Primo asks.

Paul shrugs. It’s not something he’d thought to ask the collector’s young wife as she led him around the house earlier that night, one arm draped around his shoulders, champagne sloshing out of her glass and onto the expensive rugs.

“A lot? I don’t think he intends to sell it, though.”

Primo’s grin has Paul reach for his arm again, as he glances back towards the guard whose eyes haven’t left them since they entered.

“Don’t even think about it,” he whispers. “Andiamo?”

Primo lets himself be stirred away, although Paul doesn’t miss the way he looks back at the guard and winks at him.

_“Don’t worry, Getty. I’m done with that kind of thing.”_

“What do you mean?” Paul asks, as they make their way back to the stairs.

Primo slips a cigarette between Paul’s lips and lights it for him, hands cupped around the flame under the watchful eye of the painted procession guarding the staircase, sixteenth-century noblemen looking down on them, solemn and glassy-eyed, their heads adorned with feathered caps in lush velvets, holding the bridles of their mounts and the leashes of strange pets, monkeys and cheetahs and a bear that mustn’t have been painted from life, judging from the pointed shape of his ears and his squashed snout.

 _“I don’t need to rob people at gunpoint to get what I want, not anymore,”_ Primo tells him.

“So you’re done with kidnappings, then?” Paul says, trying for a smile as the crowd pushes them together. He cranes his head back to blow his cigarette smoke at the large skylight and feels Primo’s hand settle on his hip, his fingers instinctively finding the trace of old bruises.

It’s a half-hour taxi ride to the airport. Paul figures they still have time, as long as he doesn’t fall asleep.

_“Do you want to go to another party?”_

  
  
  
  
  


When they step outside into the balmy Roman night, he tucks his cigarette at the corner of Primo’s lips and sits down on the pavement, still-warm from the afternoon sun, to remove his boots.

  
  
  
  


It’s a point of pride for Primo that these days he can stroll through a room spilling over with New Money art types and nobody stops to wonder if he belongs there, but the truth is, that will never really be his scene. He prefers his low-lit nightclubs where the music drowns out conversation and the drinks are the kind named after bombs and bullets rather than those with a wax seal and a date on the bottle. The sort of places where nobody mentions names or money, but you have to have both to get past the door.

The club beneath the railway is the kind of establishment where anything goes, and so no one bats an eyelid when he walks in with his hand on Paul’s hip. (Or if they do, it’s because Paul is dressed like he tumbled out of some rockstar’s acid trip, and the clientele here is arguably a little more business class.)

They end up in a corner, Paul on his lap with his fingers in his hair, kissing him madly, the weight of him as familiar to Primo as that of the pistol he carries. And Primo thinks he would know him even in the dark (has known him in the dark, when the sun went down in the mountains and they reached for each other on that grimy mattress, always a little surprised, it seemed, to find the other reaching back), Paul’s quick, slender hands, the raised scar on his ankle, the full curve of his mouth, which always seemed made for kissing, which pulls away from him now so that Paul can catch his breath, and Primo takes this brief respite to say,

“ _You’re in a hurry._ ”

“I’ve got a plane to catch,” Paul says, in between kissing him again. The lights from the dance floor make him look like some kind of neon angel, his hair on fire in a myriad of changing colours, his pale eyes half closed as he rolls his hips.

Primo leans back, lets his hands drop to his sides, and answers in slow, slurred English, “Don’t let me keep you.”

Paul frowns, looks like he’s going to say something, a rebuttal about the choice of words, perhaps ( _You already kept me, you bastard…_ ), but in the end just leans down to kiss him again, slower this time, his fingers curling against the side of Primo’s jaw.

He doesn’t take Paul back to his aunt’s place again — that had been a mistake — but up to a hotel room in a dingy little place near the railway where he’s never likely to go again, so it really doesn’t matter how loudly Paul moans as Primo takes him up against the wall, the boy’s legs hooked over Primo’s hips, cursing him in English and Italian, until the last moment when he tenses and murmurs _Primo…_ against his neck like he’s asking for something.

It happens again a couple of hours later, slower this time, with Paul sat astride him in bed, their clothes shed somewhere along the way, and Primo falls asleep promptly afterwards and doesn’t dream of anything. Then the next thing he knows, Paul is stumbling around the room trying to find the pair of boots he left at the side of the road last night, and when Primo sits up, squinting in the daylight, Paul can’t seem to decide if he wants to be panicked or furious.

“I missed my flight,” he says, rubbing a hand over his face in that nervous way of his. “Shit, man. I missed it, it was an hour ago!”

Primo raises his eyebrows and flops back onto the mattress. “Oh,” he says. “ _Is that right?_ ”

“Could you drop me off at the airport? _Please_ ,” Paul pleads. 

It has always been in Paul’s nature to refuse any share of the blame for whatever troubles befall him. By now he has found his clothes, shrugged on the velvet jacket, and he’s standing barefoot in a room that looks even worse in the daylight, mould climbing down the ceiling and onto the walls, a chair missing a leg, dead flies caught between the panes of the double-glazed window. Whenever a train goes by, the entire establishment rattles, from the dingy counter on the ground floor to the tiled roof. It hadn’t been much of an issue the previous night, but now it makes Primo’s head pound. He’s pretended to like the city all his life, but what he really does enjoy is the countryside streaming past the windows of his car, and the faster he goes - the blurrier it gets - the more he likes it.

 _“Please,_ ” Paul repeats, with what is no doubt a well-honed number - his mouth in a sullen pout, his hands fidgeting at his sides, endless sorrow in the pale blue eyes.

“ _I’m not your fucking driver_ ,” Primo informs him, reaching on the floor for his cigarettes.

  
  
  
  
  


He’d bought himself a better car as soon as he could, they’d invested most of the ransom money in the port but they did need to look the part, too, on this at least Leonardo agrees with him, they can’t hope to expand a business outside of their mountains if they keep dressing like peasants and driving second-hand cars. Yet when it comes to the long drive to the capital he still favours the Alfetta, less out of sentimentalism than because he knows it inside out and he trusts his ability to drive it drunk and/or high without sending it careening off a cliff. 

Paul sits beside him in silence - he’d have trouble making himself heard over the music blaring from the radio, some American tune about money, isn’t it always, and he must know Primo’s patience is wearing thin, after they’ve had to detour by the house where Paul has been staying so he could pick up his passport. 

Once they are out of Rome the road clears until they reach the airport, wide fields and factories and clear blue skies. Paul spends the drive with his head halfway out the window. He’s brought shoes but hasn’t gone so far as to put them on. The sunlight is playing with his hair and he looks healthier than Primo has ever seen him, with his golden skin and his chapped lips, as if he’d spent too much time gorging himself on summer light. If the ride in the Alfetta is bringing to mind anything but the present - thoughts of dead bodies in the trunk or of Angelo Calati’s blood seeping from Paul’s hands into the upholstery or of the imprint of Paul’s prostrate body in the back seat after yet another failed attempt at negotiating the ransom - Paul doesn’t let on.

Primo fucks him again in the airport parking lot, with the windows rolled down so they won’t pass out from the heat. Paul lets Primo’s hands guide him wherever Primo wants him, sitting in his lap on the front seat, on his hands and knees in the backseat, Primo thinking of addictions, how it had taken him a while to become dependent on coke, a line a week turning into a line every other hour. How he had thought this would tide them over, at least until the next time, and yet the moment he’d stopped the car he’d reached for Paul as readily, or thoughtlessly, or greedily as he usually reaches for the coke.

“Jesus Christ,” Paul mumbles, as they collapse against each other. “I don’t want to… We could...”

Primo has heard it so many times, that pleading tone, _We could_ , first heard it in a barn in the mountains when all Paul could think about was some grand escape, not so much from his captors as from his life as a whole.

 _“Could we?”_ Paul tries again, and Primo shuts his eyes against the sunlight and curses between his teeth, but when he gets back in the front seat (once he’s belted his trousers and retrieved his sunglasses and snorted what little coke he had left off Paul’s bare thigh) it’s to put the car in reverse and drive back toward the city, and whenever he glances in the rearview mirror, he catches a glimpse of Paul lying dishevelled in the back, smiling an uncertain smile.

  
  
  
  
  


Paul stays like that all the way back to Rome, like some strange mirror of his kidnapping, just as dishevelled but with an old familiar line ringing in his head, _I escaped, my life, my shoes, I’m just me…_ He has decided he simply will not think about it, the rest of it, what he’s done. Not for now, at least. He figures he’ll wait for the car to stop and then he’ll be able to think clearly, but the momentum carries them both back to the city and up into another hotel room, far grander this time, with little marble pillars around the doorway and the kind of soft mattress that Paul wishes Primo would just bury him in, although they’re both worn out from drinking and driving and fucking, so when they grip each other around the neck and waist and fall into bed, they’re soon asleep, and Paul has to wonder, later, if they ever really wake up, or if they just sleepwalk through the rest of it.

The artistic and moneyed types who drape themselves around Rome that summer will surely remember them, the Getty boy and the tall, dark Italian who makes you feel as if you might cut yourself on his edges if you get too close, not that this stops Paul, who is never very far from him, like the two are connected by some unseen cord, and even if they’re stood on opposite sides of a room, when one moves the other goes with them. They dress expensively and drink like they’re hoping not to wake up the next morning, and wherever they go they leave a trail of cocaine and spilt champagne and cigarette ends. Someone even claims to have seen them in Positano, drinking wine on the beach, and Paul was wearing heart-shaped sunglasses, but it is Marcello who says this, so nobody believes him.

  
  
  
  
  


Sometimes Primo orders food from the hotel and they forget to eat it, but he still buys oranges, not out of nostalgia – oranges in Rome don’t taste the same as they do back home – it’s more of an ingrained habit, and he does like to hold things an inch away from Paul’s mouth (orange slices, olives, coke, cigarettes) only to snatch them away after Paul has once again fallen for it.

(Paul always does, and has the gall to look betrayed every time.)

  
  
  
  
  
  


“ _Tell me a story about yourself_ ,” Paul says. They’re lying in the unmade bed of their latest hotel room, and the shutters are open, letting in a cool evening breeze and the lazy sounds of a clarinet player somewhere in the street below.

Primo stretches his arms back and cracks his neck. “ _You don’t want to know about me now_.” He smiles slyly. “Get you into trouble.”

Paul’s not sure how much more trouble he could possibly be in, if the phone calls from Martine and his mother and even Jutta this last fortnight are anything to go by.

But the thought doesn’t linger, as Primo slowly traces the shape of Paul’s mouth. 

“ _And you?_ ” he says. “ _What don’t I know about Paol?_ ”

“You already know everything about me.”

Primo tuts at him, pressing his finger between Paul’s lips, and he tastes like coke, and a little metallic, probably from where he’s been gripping his lighter, although Paul can’t help but think in terms of blood and pistol triggers. Then Primo takes his hand away, runs his fingers down Paul’s chest, and Paul says, “You do. _You know everything_. All the other stuff is just for show”, before Primo slides his hand between his legs.

  
  
  
  
  


What exactly had Paul imagined? That maybe they just drink themselves to death and that would be the end of this whole sorry mess? Or did he really think they’d eventually run away to a house by the coast, where he could paint seascapes and Primo could — what? Sell coke, keep chickens, fuck him mercilessly? Paul has always had a lot of ideas, but even he will admit he doesn’t usually think them through to their conclusions.

So it really shouldn’t come as a surprise when, one afternoon, Primo comes back from a phone call in the hotel lobby and announces, “ _I’m going back to Calabria_.”

“What? No, I don’t want to go back there. No way, man.”

“ _Not my problem_ .” Primo shrugs. “ _You should have thought of that_.”

“But I can’t go back, I can’t, _I don’t want_ —“

“ _What you want, what you want, it’s always what you want, Getty_ .” Primo brings his hand down loudly against the doorframe. “ _So what do you want, eh?_ ”

Paul wraps his arms around his own skinny torso and sits down on the end of the bed. He doesn’t want to look Primo in the face, the anger in his voice too familiar, dredging up memories Paul is trying hard not to think about now. But he stares at Primo’s hands instead, because he does want to look at some part of him.

“I just wanted to be with you.”

Perhaps he says it in English hoping Primo won't understand what he means, not just the words but the tense. But then, for better or worse, they have always understood one another.

  
  
  
  
  


_“It’s over?”_ Leonardo asks Primo in an undertone, as they step out of the car and out of earshot of the two men they’d chosen to accompany them, a cousin from the Arcuri side of the family and one of Dante’s older brothers, recently released from prison.

Primo lights himself a cigarette, his eyes on the sanctuary above them. Grow up in these mountains and all the shrines and buildings and villages suspended in mid-air don’t seem frightening so much as safe - impregnable. The last time the police conducted a raid on the yearly meeting of the Calabrian crime families was eight years ago; Primo doubts they’ll try it again, and even if they did, the mountains would turn against them, yielding little more than empty houses, silent trees and barren creeks.

 _“It’s over?”_ Leonardo repeats, with a hint of impatience.

_“What?”_

_“Your little fling,”_ Leonardo says, with that look he gets when he’s trying to impart some wisdom on either Primo or his son. Primo has no faith whatsoever in Leonardo’s ability to control either of them. _“It had to happen, sooner or later...”_ Leonardo sighs. _“But someone in Rome? It complicates things.”_

 _“Yes,”_ Primo says, his tone making it clear the conversation is over, although he doesn’t doubt that Leonardo will chat about it with Regina, and then the whole village will know. _Primo Nizzuto had an affair, can you believe it? Finally!_ _“It’s over.”_

And an ugly ending, too. They’d got drunk and angry, or at any rate, Primo had got angry, and maybe he’d held a gun to Paul’s head, the particulars are somewhat blurry, but he can’t have shot the boy because he distinctly remembers how, hours later, they’d stopped the car halfway to Calabria, on a deserted stretch of road surrounded by tall pines on either side, and there they’d fucked with a fresh urgency, Primo too drunk and resentful to be careful about it, Paul wincing and gasping in pain and yet pulling him ever closer, gripping him so tightly that even now as they walk up the mountain it feels like he’s holding Paul, the strong lithe shape of him, feeling the ache of it in his arms and legs and lower back. When he’d woken up, face down on the back seat of the car, hungover and bleary-eyed, still with that burning longing to fuck something up, Paul or himself or the car or the whole goddamn forest, Paul was gone.

He’d left one of his notebooks behind, a shirt trapped under Primo’s legs, crumpled tissues on Primo’s dashboard and those ridiculous glasses under the front seat. Hours later Primo had held the shirt against his face, palm rubbing hard against his crotch, but it hadn’t brought him any kind of release, all he could smell was the gas on his hands, the blood he’d just had to wipe from his nose. In the end he’d burned the lot of it, down to the glasses, as he took swigs from a bottle of whiskey he’d got at the nearest gas station, where they’d told him that Paul had stayed for two, maybe three hours until some fancy car had come to pick him up.

 _“We’re here on business, aren’t we?”_ he tells Leonardo, throwing away his cigarette. _“So let’s do business.”_

He’s never been one to look backwards. It’s a sure way to trip and fall, and in his line of work, any stumble is liable to detonate a poorly-buried landmine.

  
  
  
  
  


Jesus, he cries about it. Some. A little. Definitely more than he should, but maybe not as much as he would have if he hadn’t been on a plane full of people.

When Primo said he was going back to Calabria, Paul hadn’t thought he meant right away. He doesn’t know what he’d thought. That maybe he’d have time to convince him otherwise? Not that Primo was a man to be convinced of anything he didn’t already want to do. If anything it was the other way around this time — Primo swigging from a bottle of wine, pressing it into Paul’s hands to say that he should drink too, and Paul had never known how to say no to that, so the pair of them ended up hammered at eleven in the morning, with Primo holding onto him firmly, manically, kissing the back of his neck, and Paul pulling away, _No, no, I’m not going back… Why do you think?_ and as if to prove Paul’s point, Primo had drawn his pistol, swaying with the wine and barbiturates coursing through his system, but damn if that man couldn’t always hold a gun steady. He stood there breathing heavily, staring wildly at Paul, until at last he shoved the gun back into his waistband and took off out of the door. Paul knew he was on the stairs because he heard him snap at someone who must have gotten in his way, and that was when it occurred to him that Primo was actually leaving.

Paul’s still not really sure what he thought he was doing, running after him, except that some voice in his head kept saying _Is that it? After all this, is that how it ends?_ He caught up with Primo at the car, throwing what few belongings he’d managed to stuff into a bag into the backseat, and then slamming the door as he got in. Primo didn’t say anything, just drove, his sunglasses obscuring too much of his face for Paul to get a proper read on him.

Two hours they’d spent in that car, not a word between them, and the tension never once let up, just got worse until at last Primo swerved off the empty road and had him roughly there in the shadow of the pine trees, digging his nails into the soft skin of Paul’s thighs as he lifted him off the hood of the car like he had something to prove. There was a brutality to it but Paul still clung on to him, wrapping his legs around Primo’s waist to pull him closer and deeper, muffling his gasps against Primo’s shoulder because this was a much more fitting way to tie things off, and he would ride it out to the end.

Paul left him asleep in the back of the car. He didn’t kiss him, nothing so childish, but he did turn Primo’s head to one side, perhaps with more gentleness than the man deserved after what had just happened, with the hope he wouldn’t choke to death on his own vomit on some lonely stretch of road in the middle of nowhere. Then he hitched a ride to the nearest gas station in a passing truck, and he was grateful for it, knowing full well that if nothing had come along, he would probably have just laid down next to Primo and waited for him to wake up, to begin the whole wicked mess all over again. 

Now Paul sits on the plane trying to draw his long legs up to rest his head on his knees, smothering his mouth with the back of his hand, watching the intricacies of Italy growing smaller beneath him until suddenly the whole view is swallowed by clouds, and it’s over. No gunshots, no blaze of glory, no crater in the middle of the country to mark where they parted. Just quiet and distance.

And that, as Primo might have said, is all.


	6. London

“I feel like... I’m finally starting to put it behind me, you know?” he tells his younger sister over Christmas, which they spend at his father’s house in London. John Paul II had emerged from yet another clinic a week prior, sallow-faced but in reasonably good health. 

There aren’t enough bedrooms in the house for the lot of them, and so Paul camps on the floor of Ariadne’s room and every night they talk about the art they’ve seen during the day, trips to see movies in Picadilly and an evening at Covent Garden with both their parents in attendance, Paul dressing up for the occasion to everyone’s surprise; museums and galleries where it’s only Ariadne and him inhaling art like they do the pollution of the grey London air. 

For the first time in eight years, Paul is mostly - almost - clean.

“I’m glad to hear it,” Ariadne pipes up from the bed above him. After a silence she adds, “You still talk in your sleep, sometimes.”

“What did I say?”

Again Ariadne is silent, and it’s only when Paul has convinced himself that she’s asleep and that he should probably emulate her, that she whispers,

“Do it. _Fallo_. Like you’re begging someone to...” _To kill you,_ she doesn’t say, but the spectre of the words is as visible in the darkened bedroom as the red tip of Paul’s cigarette.

“I’m doing a lot better,” he assures her.

“You can talk to me, you know?” Ariadne ventures. In the dark her small hand finds his shoulder where he’s sitting with his back to her bed.

At Ariadne’s age, Paul was doing drugs in Morocco. He’d let a model friend of Talitha’s pull him by the hand into a bathroom stall at some snazzy reception. He’d seen Talitha die from an overdose.

“I know,” he says, giving Ariadne’s hand a brief squeeze before he lets it go. He takes another drag of his cigarette. “I do trust you.”

“If it was your idea, you’d tell me, right? The kidnapping. You’d tell me.”

Paul thinks of the betrayal on his mother’s face when he’d tried to explain it to her. Although in retrospect, maybe he hadn’t explained himself so much as thrown a heavily-edited version of the truth at her in the hope that she’d miraculously suss out the rest.

It doesn’t matter. The way he sees it now, it’s better not to love the people you trust. Safer to lie to the people you love.

  
  
  
  
  


In late December, Martine joins him with the three-year-old Balthazar and the dynamics of Paul’s life change again - Gail taking his place in Ariadne’s bedroom as he falls back into bed with his wife, not that their relationship has changed over the years, there has always been an ease to it, to becoming entangled with her, walking with his arm around her shoulders and her hand clutching his like she expects him to be torn away from her again, and then the both of them part for hours or months on end like they’re being swept around by a gust of wind, until the moment they come together again. In the meantime, they often sleep with other people, shedding those flings like they’ve shed their clothes on the floors of ballrooms and art studios and mansions and palazzi on three continents. Their son standing in the middle of it all, solemn-faced and dark-haired, far more cautious than Paul used to be, but with some of that Getty attitude nonetheless, even at such a young age. What Gail calls his “thoughtful charm” and what Paul’s father has told Martine in an undertone is the “Getty cunning”.

“You look so much happier, the two of you,” Gail tells Paul one night, as Balthazar sleeps quiet in her lap much as he used to when he was a baby, and Martine and the others are putting the final touches to a play they’ve prepared in Victoria’s honour, a colourful and expeditious rewrite of _Anthony and Cleopatra_ that Aileen and Paul have spent the past week working on. Paul slouches in his chair with his laurels askew, toying with the stem of his wine glass.

“I am happy,” he says, without looking directly at his mother. He doesn’t think he’ll ever understand why she keeps bringing up the subject, because it’s not like she’s ever satisfied with his answer. One of the desk lamps from his father’s office lies on its side on the table; until Balthazar had fallen asleep Paul had been entertaining him with a small menagerie of shadow puppets, rabbit, dog, horse, wolf, bird, duck, returning to the rabbit again because it’s his son’s favourite, trying and failing to shove away the memory of these shadows on the stone walls of the Calati house, on the wall of a hotel in Rome. A rabbit raising its head between two olive trees as Primo commanded from the bed, _“Yes, yes, the rabbit. But I want to see the goat again. Show me the goat,”_ Paul raising two fingers for the horns, folding another for the wisp of hair at the goat’s chin, trying to guide Primo’s hands into a wolf’s head until Primo had enough and batted him away, seizing a handful of his hair instead and pushing him down face first into the soft silk of expensive bed sheets, covering his body with his own, _“That’s enough,”_ because he preferred it to be magic at the tip of Paul’s fingers and had little interest in figuring out what the trick was.

“Do you think,” Paul asks, looking towards the other end of the room where his father is having a low-voiced argument with Victoria, “that some people are cursed when it comes to happiness? Cursed to be unhappy. Like art understands melancholy...”

From the look on his mother’s face, he can tell that she doesn’t get it, not even remotely. And why would she? She’s only known bursts of worry, prolonged sometimes, but it’s not in her nature to give in to despair. That must be a Getty thing. Paul shakes his head with a careless half-smile.

“I don’t even know what I’m talking about. Don’t listen to me. This is the best holiday we’ve had in years.”

“Here,” Gail says, and leans forward to adjust the crown of laurels on his red curls. “My barefooted emperor.”

  
  
  
  
  


Paul attends a few cocktail parties in London, accompanying his mother or Victoria, with Mark tagging along sometimes, sometimes Martine until she leaves to spend the New Year in some crumbling mansion with her sister and some British documentary filmmaker that she’s currently smitten with. Victoria is never out of ideas of parties they might go to and seems to enjoy those outings, taking Paul and Mark to the houses of various British luminaries, actors and painters and foreign diplomats. It’s the same crowd everywhere Paul’s been, New York and Rome and London, with a different undercurrent each time. Winter seeping into one’s bones and making people philosophical as the room fills with smoke, elbow patches and fur collars, Victoria keeping a watchful eye on him, in her own way, pulling him away from a couple snorting coke off a marble countertop, pushing a glass of wine in his left hand and a reefer in his right before she draws him out onto a balcony.

It’s an hour before midnight on New Year’s Eve, at a young lord’s townhouse on Portland Square.

“It’s been lovely having you here,” Victoria says, as they lean into each other on the corner of the empty balcony, Paul gently adjusting the collar of her coat. “It’s put your father in a better mood, too.”

Paul has his doubts about that, and for the most part his father and him have managed to coexist by keeping as much space between them as they can, something of a feat in a London townhouse. Paul Jr has been snapping at his children, at his ex-wife, at his current wife and at the help, and Paul’s willing to accept that this means he’s doing better, but it’s not exactly making him good company.

“He’s lucky to have you,” he says.

“He is indeed,” Victoria agrees, lighting up the reefer. “But we know each other well by now. Maybe that’s the secret to any long lasting relationship, when the illusions have vanished and all you can see is who the person really is.”

“Maybe,” Paul agrees, nodding wisely, and Victoria laughs.

“Little Paul. You’re still so very young. Tell me then, what do you see?”

Paul is far too drunk to carry on any semblance of a coherent conversation. He gives her one of those smiles guaranteed to get him another drag of the reefer.

“What do I see?”

“When I look at your father, I see a man who’s forgotten to be young, but who doesn’t know how to age,” Victoria smiles. “He’s not as demanding as people might think, though. All he needs is a little admiration, and in spite of everything, I do admire him. It takes some character to survive a family like yours. What about you? What do you see?”

Paul rubs his mouth with a nervous hand as he looks out at the alignment of Georgian houses across the street, a world away from the New York skyline, from warm nights spent walking along the Tevere.

“Cocaine lines,” he says. “Shadow puppets. Blood...” He widens his hands. “... All over a table. The kind of sex that hurts a little.” He takes another drag of the reefer. “Michelangelo’s David... No, Michelangelo’s Bacchus. I’m not making any sense, right?”

Victoria’s fond and faintly seductive smile has faded away; a new line creases the corner of her red mouth. Paul wonders if he should kiss her. It’s the sort of stupid thing he’d have done a few years ago, but these days even the most casual mistakes seem to require some energy he doesn’t have.

“We never make much sense when we’re in love, do we?” she says, and he couldn’t say if the look in her eyes is pity or envy.

  
  
  
  
  


Martine decides to stay a few weeks longer, to shoot a film with Jutta and their artsy crowd in the polished countryside surrounding their friend’s Neopalladian ruin of a house. Gail takes Balthazar back to California and Paul, who’s left it until the last minute to book his ticket home, decides to leave the decision up to chance. Heads, he’ll join the twins and relapse in Surrey, tails, he’ll go back to New York and relapse somewhere between Studio 54 and the Factory.

In the end it’s the snow that makes up his mind, as he waits for one of the twins’ friends to come pick him up on the porch stairs outside his father’s house, hat pulled low over his ears, nose aching from the cold. When the guy finally shows up, Paul just pats the top of the car.

“I’m good, man. Tell Martine I’ll see her in New York,” and he goes to catch a plane to Rome.

  
  
  
  
  


Marcello picks him up at the airport — or rather, Marcello’s girlfriend, since she’s the one with the car, a clattering little VW that can’t shift into first gear, so all their stops on the way back to the city are made abruptly in second, hurling Paul and his suitcase against the front seats. He doesn’t mind so much, after feeling as though he’s been handled like a glass ornament for the past couple of months. He’s kind of in the mood to be jostled around. (It was no bad thing, to be gentle with people for a little while. But spend too much time around your parents and you start turning into a child again.)

“This is fated,” Marcello says, shuffling around in the passenger seat to pass Paul a cigarette. “I was just telling Bianca here that what we need is a good party. Everything’s been so dead since New Year’s.”

Paul’s not sure he’s all that good at parties these days, although he’s well aware that’s the only currency he really has in Rome anymore. He offers Marcello a weary smile. “I don’t know, man. Maybe.”

“Well what else is John Paul Getty going to do in Rome, mm?”

“Painting,” Paul says, but it comes out sounding defensive. He doesn’t like the way Marcello’s looking at him, like his old friend thinks he knows something he shouldn’t.

When they reach the city, he asks if they can drop him off at the Residenza Napoleone.

“You got the cash for this kind of place?” Marcello laughs, and Paul is glad the car journey is almost over.

“I left some stuff here last summer. Bunch of my notebooks. I don’t know, I was hoping maybe they’d still have them.”

“You and your books. Did you leave your heart-shaped glasses here too?”

Paul thumps the back of Marcello’s seat. “Man, why do you keep telling people that? I never had any heart-shaped glasses.”

(He kind of enjoys that, lying about it. They were the sort of tat that beachside shops usually put out for tourists, and Paul had tried them on as a joke, grinning as Primo clicked his tongue at him, _Oh what, these aren’t doing it for you?_ And yet somehow he’d ended up wearing them for the rest of the weekend, even, sometimes, when he was wearing nothing else at all.)

The hotel is just as grand as he remembers it, with its vaulted ceilings and marble floors, the busts of various Roman emperors watching sternly as Paul slips past, already feeling too hot and out of place in his winter coat. It’s the sort of building that should be home to princes, and probably was at one point or another. (Hadn’t Primo called him a prince once, one evening when they were lying with inches of distance between them in the Calati house? It had been meant as a taunt, but there had been times last summer when Paul felt princely, tilting his head back in a claw-footed bathtub to take cocaine and orange slices out of Primo’s hands.)

“ _Welcome back, sir_ ,” the woman at the front desk says, and Paul has to look over his shoulder to check it’s him she’s talking to. _“You are staying with us again?”_

“Oh no, I don’t have…” Paul sighs. _I don’t have any money_. Jesus, he could die happy never having to say that again. He hadn’t expected anyone to recognise him, hadn’t expected to be remembered at all, as he himself only remembers bits and pieces of his stay here, high as the moon for most of it.

But the woman at the desk smiles and says, “The usual account, sir?” and he slips back into his charming smile and gentle “ _Yes, thank you,_ ” like putting on an old jacket.

He spends his days in galleries, tucked away in the corner with his notebooks. It is much warmer in Rome than London, but still too cold to go barefoot, although often he will take his shoes off and sit in his socks on the floor, sketching Renaissance statues. Sometimes he gives them a different face, and he thinks about something his mother said on Christmas Eve, when Aileen was going on about some boy she’d met at the library. “That’s just what we do when we’re in love, isn’t it? Talk about them all the time, so at least we can exist together somewhere, even if it’s only in the same sentence.” It was one of his mother’s quirkier observations, which she always seemed to have more readily at hand after talking to Chace (although, Paul noted, his name was not dropped into any of her sentences).

This in turn reminds him of Victoria’s remark on New Year’s Eve. “We never make much sense when we’re in love, do we?” That word again. He always figured he was just in love with everybody, but these days it’s as if he was watching his interactions with his friends and family happen to somebody else. These last five years there have been few occasions when he really felt present in the moment, and that’s usually because he was dragged kicking and screaming and moaning gratefully into it by a pair of hands he can’t seem to stop drawing.

He’s not in love with him. That would be ridiculous, like checking into a hotel room on somebody else’s account, or ordering expensive room service for every meal, or using the last of the lira trapped in the lining of his coat to phone Marcello and say, “Hey man, you still on for that party?”

And it almost feels like the good old days, like he’s a fly stuck in the wild summer amber of ‘73, before he knew the feeling of a rifle barrel jabbed between his shoulder blades, or the cold damp floor of old train tunnels against his cheek, or fingers on his hips gripping hard enough to leave a mark. It _almost_ feels like it, as he knocks back whiskey shots and methadone, coke and tequila with the gleeful hunger that only comes from abandoned abstinence. For a few nights he glows, the lively centre of everyone’s attention, even as they fill his bathtub with prosecco, swing from his balcony, and leave lipstick smears on the mouths of statues. There are complaints from the other hotel guests, of course there are, but Paul doesn’t hear them, his head between some model’s long brown legs, or drinking wine upside down on the antique coffee table, or kneeling over the toilet, trying to keep his hair out of his face as he wretches up amaretto and glitter. 

He doesn’t say no when Marcello’s girlfriend unbuttons her blouse and places his hands on her breasts, nor does he push away the young man who kisses his bare shoulder as the three of them, four of them, five of them undress in the suite’s elegant living room, where Napoleon supposedly once ate dinner. It’s how he feels when he drinks, Paul thinks, as he climbs into one man’s lap, with Bianca leaving kisses along his spine — the wine and the powder, it’s like so many hands gathering him up to say _It’s alright, alright, we’ve got you_. And it’s like this, with so many people’s hands on him, that Paul looks up to see Primo standing in the doorway, with that same look on his face he’d once worn before he blew Angelo Calati’s brains out.

  
  
  
  
  


Primo empties the hotel suite quickly enough, barely registering the weight of the gun in his hand, barking threats in the kind of tone he’d use to bring a room of quarrelling mobsters to heel. The half-dressed artistes and kids with rings of coke around their nostrils scurry past him, vanishing down the elegant corridors, all except Paul, lying on the sofa with his trousers around his ankles, staring up at him with that wild blue gaze, breathing fast and heavy with the adrenaline or barbiturates or perhaps some lingering arousal from where that girl had had her hand between his legs, those long legs that had gripped Primo’s waist so fiercely the last time.

“Allora,” Primo says, standing over him. He’s not sure who he was expecting to find here, but of course it’s Paul, who else but the billion-dollar boy would even dream of drinking and smoking away Primo’s money?

Paul who fixes him with those haunting eyes now, his Botticelli hair tossed back against the sofa cushion, parting his legs slightly but enough that Primo knows what he’s suggesting, even as he pants, “Allora…” like he’s mocking what Primo just said.

Out of his fucking head, what a surprise. And yet Primo, who drove five hours here telling himself with every passing mile that he would put a bullet in the mouth of whoever he found at the other end, feels like a sparking piece of wire, and all that energy has to go somewhere.

It’s either shooting the boy now or dying sometime soon because he didn’t. Primo is aware of it, even as he sets the gun down on a coffee table smeared with wine and coke, and tosses off his jacket and knife, going to meet Paul armed only with his bare hands and that anger burning him like a fever, to a refrain of _I’ll strangle him, I’ll burn, I’ll bury him._ And he loses a second or two there, between the moment he reaches for Paul’s neck and the moment his hands bury themselves in Paul’s hair. Try as he might to tell himself that he’s in control - that Paul is at his mercy, naked and pinned to the sofa - he’s not stupid enough to believe it. It wasn’t Paul who walked straight into a trap - rushed straight into it all the way from Calabria, to end up entangled in a boy’s long limbs, hands bound with his red hair, obeying breathless commands of “Yeah, like that” and “More” and “Don’t stop”, spurred on by a sharp jab of a heel and by narrow hips that rise to meet his as he buries himself as deep as he can. 

When it’s over Primo lights two cigarettes and puts one of them between Paul’s lips. The only alcohol he’s had all day was the liquor he licked off Paul’s neck. He’s far too sober for this, sober enough to realise it has happened more times than he can count, with variations in the details, but the same overall conclusions. He knows that Paul’s voice will break if he grips his hair with the right amount of pressure, has long learned the catch in Paul’s breath that means he’s close, has learned to swallow that final choked-off sound just so he can feel Paul moan against his mouth. And it’s not only about the things he knows, but about the knowledge Paul hoards as well, that he could bring him down just by parting his lips, opening his legs, having figured out a while back that Primo gets off on his insults, the lazy fling of a “bastard” wielded just at the right time. 

Primo has never been one to let a complication develop past the stage where he can shoot it in the head. 

_“It’s over,”_ he says, though Paul just gives him a look, like his threats might have stopped carrying weight the moment he put his gun down on that table.

“I’m here for two more weeks,” Paul says, rising onto an elbow, his curls in disarray. There’s a trace of lipstick on his cheek, another one below his ribs. “Due settimane?”

 _“I’ve got things to do,”_ Primo tells him, a familiar warning, but Paul bites his lip and says,

_“Then I’ll come with you? And you can bring me back… In two weeks.”_

Whatever’s changed his mind, Primo won’t ask. In his experience, suicidal ideas only pan out when you fuck them hard and take off too fast for them to follow. They shake on it.

 _“It’s a deal,”_ he says.


	7. The hunting cabin

Paul dozes off in the car, waking up now and then to an endless stretch of road, or the outskirts of Napoli, or those same forests of pine where they stopped off the last time, unless those are different forests, it’s hard to tell by night. Shifting in his seat, he tries to fit his cheek against his balled-up jumper - Primo had made a face at him when he’d seen him try to stuff his things in a suitcase, an actual suitcase, and later Paul had felt the last traces of London rubbing off of him, as he curled up in the car and kicked off his shoes and waited for sleep to dispel the worse of his hangover.

The headlights frame a hypnotic strip of yellow road and the sky above the trees has gone through ten or twelve shades of blue since they left (Paul counted them based on paintings he’d seen in London, from the pale, tranquil blue of the sky above Turner’s Bridge of Sighs to the rich, royal blue of the coat of Sassoferrato’s Virgin Mary). Primo has been smoking since they left, or at least, he’s smoking every time Paul wakes up. The car smells of little else. Now and again, Primo turns on the radio and accompanies whatever song is on in a low voice, only part of it if it’s in English, only the words he understands.

“We’re not going back to the house, right?” Paul had asked early on. When Primo had only stared blankly at him, he’d repeated it in Italian. This hadn’t won him an answer either.

He has no desire to go back to the Calati house, has no desire, in fact, to return to Calabria, but it’s easier not to focus too much on that while there’s still drugs in his system, drugs and some unquantifiable amount of alcohol. He can sneak glances at Primo’s hands and remind himself of the way Primo had fallen upon him in that hotel suite, like maybe he had forgotten sex was a thing between Paul’s departure and his return, and he needed to make up for lost time.

“Do I need a disguise or something?” he’d asked, as he threw what clothes he could find in the suitcase. Some of these were distinctly unfamiliar, belonging maybe to the people Primo had kicked out of the suite at gunpoint. “I could dye my hair?” he suggested. “Cambiare il colore dei capelli?”

Primo had looked at him like he’d gone mad.

“ _Dumb idea_ ,” he’d muttered, and Paul had just shrugged.

“Whatever man, I was just trying to be helpful.”

Primo’s reaction had satisfied him, though. He’s decided to take it as proof of something he’s suspected for a while - that Primo quite likes his hair, even though it’s too long and too bright and utterly out of control.

They stop a few times, for gas and so Primo can stretch his legs (the smoking, the bumps of coke he can manage while driving). Paul just shifts against the car door each time and falls back asleep, and eventually he’s woken up by Primo shaking his shoulder, the reluctant “Paol” that means he’s annoyed at having had to repeat himself.

_“We’re here.”_

Primo’s left the headlights on and at first all Paul can see is the stone front of a house, until he shambles out and the sky unfurls above him, thousands and thousands of stars. From the pitch of the wind he can tell a void is near, the mountain dropping off into forests below.

“Come on,” Primo says, the annoyance returning, his voice strained with the exhaustion of the six hour drive from Rome; and the six hour drive to Rome before that.

He sets off and Paul follows.

  
  
  
  
  


Primo would have preferred to stay awake that first night – it’s been a long time since he was last here, there are entry points that need securing – but he is worn to the bone from driving and fucking and driving again. The bed has that cold, slightly damp feel of somewhere that’s been left uninhabited for a while, and he collapses onto it, fully clothed, without bothering to pull back the covers. At one point, he wakes to find his boots removed, his face pressed into Paul’s hair. Paul doesn’t take up much room, curling his body away, his arms wrapped around himself as he sleeps. For the most part they are lying on opposite sides of the bed, except for where Primo has his chin against the back of Paul’s head, breathing in the smell of him, all cigarettes and sweat and something like paperback pages.

It wasn’t such a stupid idea, Paul disguising himself. It was surprisingly mindful, coming from the boy. But dyeing his hair? Like kicking dirt over a fire. Paul wouldn’t cut up one of his precious Old Masters’ paintings, after all. Seems like the same logic to Primo, still half asleep. A disguise would have been one of Paul’s better ideas; there’ll be trouble if anybody catches them, but first, Primo thinks, they’ll have to catch them.

  
  
  
  
  


They don’t speak much during the daytime. Usually Primo leaves before Paul wakes up and heads down into the foothills of the mountains, where the towns and villages come up to meet the Calabrian wilderness. There he gets on with work as though nothing’s changed. A meeting must be organised with some of the Camorra, and with a family from New York who are interested in doing business. Meanwhile Leonardo plies him with leases to sign, shipping manifestos to go over, all the while fretting like his aunt that Primo hasn’t done such and such properly, or taken this or that precaution.

“ _I know what I’m doing_ ,” Primo reminds him, in a tone Leonardo calls _petulant_.

“ _You seem distracted_.” Leonardo doesn’t look at him as he shuffles his papers. “ _Where have you been lately? I heard you were up in the mountains_.”

Primo raises his eyebrows. “ _Well then. Mind your business, Mr Accountant_.”

Whenever he returns to that little stone house, Paul is sitting by the window in his moth-eaten jumper, with leaves caught in his hair, traces of snow melting on his coat hung up by the door, his fingers still pink with the cold as he scribbles something down in one of his books.

“ _I was out in the woods_ ,” he says. “It’s so beautiful here. Kind of reminds me of California, you know? Up north, where there’s forests. But it’s different here, like, really wild.”

Sometimes he has made coffee, strong and black, in little metal cups, which he never offers directly, but leaves nearby so that Primo can reach for it if he wants. Their little rituals and routines are close enough to something that Primo never pictured having (or even wanting).

At night they fall into each other with their usual hunger, pulling one another fiercely close against the cold, Paul’s arm around the back of Primo’s neck, his other hand gripping Primo’s arse as he arches into the rhythm, loud about it with no one but the pines and crows to hear them for miles.

“I saw you once,” Paul says one evening, while the wind presses against the windows and makes the frames creak. He’s sitting by the fireplace in his jumper and socks, his bare legs soaking up the firelight, his hair drenched in it, as he puts down his notebook to prod at the burning logs with the poker. He is surprisingly adept at making fires — something Primo’s never been much good at without a tank of gasoline, but Paul can build one from scratch, dead leaves and kindling twigs, cupping his hands around the smoking embers and blowing on them until they come to life. He is gentle with fire the same way he is gentle with Primo, sometimes.

“At Berto’s,” he explains now. “Before… You were standing at the counter, pouring yourself a glass of wine. I never thought about it, but it was you.”

That could be true. Possibly. But Primo never saw Paul, never looked at any of the customers at that place. What were they to him? The first time he ever saw Paul was in the centrefold of a magazine he wouldn’t normally have bothered to glance at, and he had briefly wondered, for about fifteen minutes in the bathroom of some nightclub with his hand between his legs, if the long-limbed heir to Getty Oil was a good fuck.

“I don’t know, it’s just funny, I guess,” Paul is saying softly. “We could have met before. _Things could have been… different_.”

That is such a Paul thing to say, never thinking beyond the end of his own sentences. Even if they had met at Bertolini’s, or anywhere else in Rome, Paul would still have been heir to a fortune he was too absorbed pretending he didn’t want. And Primo would still have been his uncle’s nephew. He would still have been what he was born into, they both would.

“ _It’s not so bad_.” Primo spares a glance at the cabin. “Like this.”

But Paul sits up stiffly then, fixes him with that same look Primo used to give his father when he was old enough to stay standing even with blood pouring from his nose.

“Do you have any idea what it’s like? I’m not so out of my fucking head that I don’t remember. Jesus, lying in that barn listening to them digging a hole in the ground that I _knew_ they were going to put me in… Fuck, man. Don’t you ever think about any of that?”

Primo shrugs. So long as he gets where he wanted to go, he doesn’t usually waste time worrying about how he got there. Paul is breaking the unspoken rule they seemed to have agreed on all these years, that they don’t talk about what happened, even the parts of it where they fucked one another breathless. But perhaps Primo should have seen this coming, bringing him back to Calabria. You get the dust of this place on you and it never really comes off.

“You’re such a bastard,” Paul mutters.

“ _Oh that’s right,_ ” Primo snaps back. “ _Little millionnaire,_ _you have no idea what I am, and if you did, you wouldn’t talk to me like that_.”

“I know what you are,” Paul says bitterly, but then he drags his hand over his face and sighs, “This is such a mess.”

“ _This is as good as it gets in a place like this. For people like us_.”

Growing up in Rome and California must have been a hell of a thing, Primo thinks. He can’t know for sure, of course, the kind of life Paul led before all of this, but he can make a damn good guess that Paul’s father never caught him on his knees with a boy from two towns over and made him watch while he stood on that boy’s fingers.

There will be trouble, even now, if word gets out about this, the two of them up here in the mountains. And Primo has further to fall these days. But he’d known all this when he agreed to Paul’s offer to come away with him. It’s a risk some part of him has decided he’s willing to take this time, perhaps because there are only so many things you can be made to watch, like the same person leaving holes in your life over and over again.

He gets up and grips Paul under the jaw, like he hasn’t decided whether he still wants to be angry with him, but Paul looks up at him with those startled blue eyes, and Primo finds his hand tangling in the boy’s wild hair, fingers brushing up against his ear, and Paul flinches.

“ _Does it still hurt?_ ”

“All the time. But just like, the memory of it.” Paul leans into Primo’s hand, his eyes closed, lips parted, like he’s waiting to receive the sacrament on his tongue. “Take me to bed. Please. It’s the only time I want to feel anything.”

Primo fucks him slowly, with Paul’s legs hooked over his shoulders, and Paul tilts his head up often to kiss him, calls him a bastard again but this time on the tail end of whispering “ _You’re so good at that_ ” against Primo’s mouth. Afterwards Primo isn’t entirely sure which one of them was angry at the other, and who has just forgiven whom.

In the morning he wakes early, leaving Paul curled up under the covers, but when he opens the door, Leonardo is standing on the doorstep, arms folded, and he stares past Primo to where Paul’s coat is hanging up behind him.

“ _Primo, what have you done?_ ”

  
  
  
  


Primo closes the door before Leonardo can be sure of what he’s seen.

What he thinks he’s seen (a flash of red above an old blanket) is enough for him to question the impulse that had led him to abandon the warmth of his bed and Regina’s sleepy embrace to drive up a mountain before dawn.

It could be anything. With Primo, this kind of prognosis is never reassuring.

_“What do you think you’re doing?,”_ Primo says, with the sort of tone that’s meant to convey imminent violence, but Leonardo stands his ground, much as he used to when Primo was little more than Don Salvatore’s irritable live fuse of a nephew.

_“Your business is my business,”_ he reminds him.

_“This isn’t business.”_ To Leonardo’s surprise, Primo seems to relent. _“I needed a place away from everything. So I could rest. So I could… reorganise.”_

He isn’t relenting, Leonardo realises. He’s merely changing tactics.

Primo grabs his arm and begins to steer him towards the overgrown road where their cars are parked. Leonardo had parked at some distance on purpose; from the beginning he could tell there was something fishy about all this, Primo’s sudden urge to disappear to that house on a nightly basis when it’s two hours away from the port, two hours away from the village on winding mountain roads and forest paths, some of which haven’t been built with a car in mind. Primo doesn’t feel at home in the big crumbling house he bought in their village, that much is obvious. Leonardo could have told him this much before he signed the lease if Primo had been willing to listen to anyone’s advice, but this little mountain house doesn’t fit him either.

Leonardo knows for a fact that when Primo can’t sleep, he snorts enough coke to ensure he won’t pass out at the wheel, and drives through the night. When he doesn’t feel like sleeping in his house, he sleeps in his car, or in the bedroom of whomever he’s fucked the night before. 

_“I better not see you here again,”_ Primo warns him, as he opens the door of Leonardo’s car and all but shoves him inside. _“You’re a good accountant, but I can find another good accountant. Now fuck off. We’re on a schedule.”_

Time is of the essence, Leonardo knows it: if he waits too long Primo will move his mess elsewhere and he’ll have to trail him all over again to some equally remote location, unable to delegate the infuriating matter to anybody else because that would compromise Primo, and compromise him by association, and since Don Salvatore’s death this ‘ndrina has been the two of them first and foremost. If anything happens to Primo, Leonardo is fucked - his son and his wife, the entire village and, possibly, the economy of Calabria will be fucked, by order of priority. No man should hold that much power over Leonardo’s life, especially not a man as volatile as Primo Nizzuto. (And maybe Primo isn’t entirely to blame for what he’s become, maybe every brutal drunk of a father casts a die on the day their son is born, and if the side that comes up makes the boy a good man or a bad man or the devil himself, some of it is down to luck - but that is hardly relevant to the matter at hand.)

The previous year has been fraught with conflict where the port is concerned; wars over construction contracts that have led to the deaths of a rival boss and of so many foot soldiers on all sides that Leonardo has lost count. It is a different kind of game they are playing now, he thinks, as he parks his car at the foot of the mountain and begins to climb on foot. So many of the old codes no longer apply. If he can only stay afloat another year, he’ll see Francesco off to college, and then, if Primo wants to douse himself in gasoline in the middle of a million-dollar infrastructure and strike a match - Leonardo might just let him.

The door of the house is closed, with no smoke coming out of the chimney. It’s a brisk, pine-scented afternoon under a fleecy white sky. Leonardo finds the boy at some distance from the stone walls, sitting under a juniper tree speckled with snow with his knees against his chest, tossing crumbs at a sparrow that flies off the moment Leonardo comes into view.

He doesn’t know what he’d been expecting. Another kidnapping, maybe, which would have been a terrible idea, but hardly Primo’s first. Or some red-haired girl Primo had brought back from Rome because he’s come to associate red curls with pleasure or money or success or whatever a deeply troubled man like Primo might find sexually arousing. The reality of it - Paul Getty smiling at him as he brushes snow off his hair and unfolds his ridiculously long limbs - is far too odd to comprehend.

“I made coffee,” the boy says, like it should be a source of particular pride. “Do you want some?”

In six years, Paul hasn’t changed much. In fact, watching him stumble off towards the house, pocketing the flask of whatever he’d been sipping alone on a Calabrian mountain top, Leonardo wonders if he’s even changed at all.


	8. Out of the woods

“I guess you probably have some questions, huh,” Paul says, as he pours the coffee and pushes a dented metal cup towards Leonardo, gesturing for him to sit down opposite.

He keeps his hands buried in his tatty woollen sleeves, an oddly childish gesture for a twenty-two-year-old, Leonardo thinks, but then again perhaps not. Thrown into adulthood too soon, he probably doesn’t really know the difference between boy and man. Leonardo remembers Paul telling him gently that he didn’t blame Francesco for cutting off his ear, that he took responsibility for mutilating himself like that. What a thing to go through at any age.

(It certainly had an effect on Francesco, who doesn’t carry Salvatore’s knife anymore, keeps it shut away in a box under his bed, won’t even look at it – prefers now to mimic the way the grown men hold their guns, and dresses like a little caricature of Primo.)

“Yes,” Leonardo says carefully. There are a lot of questions, it’s true, but the first thing that comes out is, “You’re alright?”

Paul bites his lip. “Oh, you know.”

No, Leonardo thinks, he doesn’t know, and whatever the hell he thought he knew — about Primo, about human nature — went entirely out the window the moment he saw Paul sitting there under the tree.

Leonardo looks around; the sparse interior doesn’t seem to have been updated since the 1950s, chipped plywood cabinets and greyish net curtains, a faded plaid armchair in the corner that looks as though it’s been there long enough it’s grown roots and dug itself into the foundations of the house. All of which seems totally incongruous with Primo, as do the bunches of dried herbs hanging from one of the ceiling beams, the old leather binocular case on the mantelpiece. These are touches too personal for a man who never stands still long enough to settle in, and Leonardo seems to remember something now about a maternal grandfather who was keen on hunting. Certainly Primo’s father was good with a handgun but no crack shot with a rifle. That had always been Primo’s weapon of choice, and he must have picked it up somewhere. What a strange place to bring this boy, a little window on his life, and Leonardo wonders if Paul has even the faintest idea what he’s looking at.

“But you aren’t…?” Leonardo tries again. “He hasn’t hurt you?”

Paul smiles softly and looks down at his coffee. “No. It’s, uh…not like that.”

“Allora, what is it like, hm?”

It comes out gruffer than he meant it, but this is serious, this could very well be the future of Calabria, of his family, and as much as Paul has experienced in his short life, Leonardo has always felt the boy miscalculates the fallout of the trouble he causes. 

And what could this possibly be except trouble?

Paul pushes his wild hair back from his face and says, “I’m just staying here for a couple of weeks, you know?”

“With Primo.”

“Yeah.”

Something occurs to Leonardo then. “Do you still go to Rome?”

“Sometimes.” Paul chews his lip again. “Not a lot. I live in New York now.”

“But you were in Rome last summer?”

“Sure, for a little while.”

So that’s what Primo was up to, those weeks away with only a few sporadic phone calls to let them know he hadn’t driven his car off a mountainside in a coked-up frenzy. Whatever Leonardo had thought to begin with, this is so much worse.

“How long…?” He doesn’t even know how to phrase that.

Paul retrieves the little flask he was swigging from earlier and pours the remaining liquor into his coffee. “From the start, I guess.”

“But this, this is not the same. You are free, ragazzo, so what are you doing here?”

Paul takes a long drink and grimaces. “I’m killing myself, man, I know that. People think I don’t, but I know what I’m doing. I just can’t seem to stop, and I think it’s the same with him, you know? Like a needle and a spoon. Hard to quit something when it’s gotten under your skin.”

“He will kill you.”

Paul laughs softly. “That’s Gettys for you, man. It’s always high stakes.” He takes another swig of potent coffee and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “I guess you probably can’t stay. I know you guys are busy. But it was good to see you again, really. I hope Francesco’s doing okay.”

Leonardo gives him a look that he hopes will convey what he means: that Francesco is about as well as can be expected, after what Paul made him do. But he’s worried that if he opens his mouth he will say something unkind, and still, after all of it, Leonardo doesn’t dislike the boy. How could anybody? With his angel face and his gentle voice, he charms them all, and at one point Leonardo had thought Primo was immune to all that, doggedly focussed on the money and nothing else, but apparently Salvatore’s wild nephew was just as human as the rest of them. As blindly, as foolishly human.

“I have a son now too, you know,” Paul says suddenly. “Balthazar. He’s going to be four next week, how crazy is that?”

Leonardo remembers something he told Francesco on the day of his Confirmation, that a boy is not a man until he has a child to care for. But looking at Paul now, with his hands in his sleeves, Leonardo thinks _What the hell did I know? What the hell do I know about any of it?_

Before he goes, Leonardo stands on the doorstep for a long time, like he’s weighing what he wants to say, unless it’s that he’s reluctant to leave Paul here alone - or to leave him here with Primo. 

_“Two weeks, yes?”_

“Yeah... I have to be in New York to shoot this movie on the… twenty-third I think.” Paul laughs. “What day is it, actually? Che giorno è?”

 _“Heaven above,”_ Leonardo sighs. “It’s the nineteenth.”

“You know how it is up here.” Paul gazes up at the mountaintops. “Time’s almost… elastic, yeah? It’s not exactly the sort of time you’d get from a clock. The time of the wind and the trees. And Primo’s time.” He sticks his hands under his arms to ward off the chill. “When Primo’s around.” 

“If you forget to leave, I will come and get you myself,” Leonardo says. It comes out sounding like a promise rather than a threat.

Primo doesn’t come in that night.

This isn’t quite the way the thought takes shape in Paul’s head when he wakes up with the cold sunrise; in fact he thinks, “He didn’t come home,” and then snorts at the absurdity of the idea, that this house should be home, when the bathroom is the nearby river and a hole in the woods behind the house, and the kitchen is the hearth and a portable gas stove, and if he wants to write after the sun goes down, he needs to curl up by the fire, or light the candle stubs on the table. And yet. He’s grown fond of the place, not only the ancient plaid armchair and the dried herbs (he’ll have dried herbs in his flat in New York, he’s decided) and the bed that smells of Primo, where he spends hours in the morning sleeping off whatever cocktail of booze and coke they’ve dined on, but also the mountain with its craggy shape like an old man’s face, the forest so vast and quiet it would be easy to believe it had never seen any human life before Paul wandered in among the ferns.

On the evening that followed Leonardo’s visit, Paul had waited outside the house until it grew too cold to do so, after which he’d waited by the fire, and then in bed, always trying to appear absorbed not in the act of waiting but in whatever he was doing, braiding the weeds that poked through the snow, writing down ideas for a movie, and finally falling asleep, and when he woke up, Primo hadn’t come back.

It’s only then that he realises that Primo has been back every night since they arrived, in spite of the familiar refrain of _“the business, the business,”_ which Primo does translate now as “the business” sometimes, “the business, Paol,” but whatever it is that he’s been doing lately, until now it had never kept him overnight.

During the day Paul takes a basin to the river and returns with some water to wash his hair and some of his clothes. He eats what’s left of the bread Primo brought the day before, and a few oranges, he scribbles some more (the showdown between father and son will happen in the mountains, he’s decided, it will be the climax of the movie), he does a line of coke, draws a series of sketches of two men locked in a wild embrace, like a little film itself, each drawing bringing them closer, and closer, and closer, until he scatters the pages and lets them drift apart again. Outside he jumps into the snow and basks in the sun and runs in to throw himself in front of the fire as the snow melts on his shoulders. In the evening he waits.

The days he’s become used to spending alone, and maybe if there hadn’t been a set date for his return he’d have worried he might eventually tire of it all, but knowing it won’t last he hasn’t; knowing his time here is limited, he’s been happy. The days he’s become used to spending alone, but the nights are Primo’s, and those drag on, a first night, and then a second, and on the third Paul knocks himself out with a dusty bottle of wine he’s found in a cupboard so he won’t just lie awake and shivering, rubbing his legs against each other under the scratchy blankets, wearing his jeans and two separate jumpers, his head pillowed on a shirt Primo left behind. He dreams that he’s carried out of the house by the hands of uncaring strangers, kicking and screaming; he dreams that he’s lying down in a wagon watching the pines go by, but Angelo isn’t there with him and he’s lost his shoes, and the night is coming in.

On the third day Paul does think about leaving. He’s mostly run out of food and he’s definitely run out of coke, although as far as the alcohol goes there are a few more of those gritty bottles in the cabinet. His plane is due the next day and the prospect of living like a hermit alone and chaste on some mountain he doesn’t know the name of holds less allure than whiling away the time until Primo returns to fuck him senseless. Primo must have been held up by some mafia-related business - anything else doesn’t bear considering. (This Paul had expected: that Primo would eventually kill him, in one of his moments of cold-blooded anger. That Primo himself might die has never crossed his mind). 

He’s made a fresh pot of coffee and is generously spiking his cup with the remaining brandy when he hears footsteps outside.

It’s not Primo, and it’s not Leonardo, either. That much is clear from the moment he peers around the door. The young man must be a few years younger than Paul, though he’s trying to look older, with that trimmed black moustache and his hair combed back and that black leather jacket with a sheepskin collar. It does little to hide his narrow build as he stands there at the edge of the trees, a rifle slung over his shoulder.

 _“Hello?”_ he calls out.

Paul considers staying inside, but it’s not like there’s anywhere to hide. As for ways to defend himself, there are few. The day after they got here, Primo had tried to teach him to use a rifle - they’d spent time in the woods lying in the undergrowth, waiting for prey, but it had been a frustrating episode on both sides. Primo didn’t have the patience to teach anyone anything. Paul had no desire to learn how to shoot things. In the end he’d managed to hold the rifle and aim it in the general direction of the target and they’d called it a day.

What decides him is the plastic bag in the young man’s hand, bulging with cans and what appears to be a loaf of bread.

When Paul takes a cautious step outside, the boy’s head whips towards-him, bird-sharp.

“Hippie,” he says, his dark eyes widening.

“Francesco?” Paul ventures. And gesturing at his back, much like he had several days ago when Leonardo had appeared on his mountain, he says, “There’s coffee, if you want some.”

Once they’ve settled inside, Francesco unslinging the rifle from his shoulder and putting it by the door, Paul makes no attempt at masking his relief.

“I’m glad… _I’m happy you showed up._ I was going a bit crazy here all alone.”

 _“What are you doing here?”_ Francesco asks. He repeats it once again in slow English.

“ _I’m waiting for Primo. Do you know where he is?_ ”

Francesco nods, whispers a word of thanks as Paul puts one of the dented cups before him and fills it with steaming coffee.

“We killed a capo,” he says, with a hint of pride. “Last week, at the… the port? And his family, they want revenge.”

“Right,” Paul says, both hands pressed against the warm cup. 

It’s not something he’d concerned himself with of late, the violence of Calabria and how it lurks in those peaceful landscapes, never so far out of sight that you can’t hear the echo of a threat in the deafening silence. He didn’t ask Primo about his business and what he did know he’d shoved to the back of his memory: Primo shooting people just like that, easy as breathing; how Primo had turned back towards him after he’d caused Berto’s car to dive into a field, had looked towards him as he’d strangled Berto, like he was expecting, not just fear, but admiration. And maybe some part of Paul does admire him, but he doesn’t want to look at it too closely.

 _“How’s Primo?”_ he ventures.

“The man’s family, they wanted revenge,” Francesco explains. “They attack us, and we attack them, and now we have to…” He gestures with his hand, palms down towards the table. _“Keep a low profile.”_

“Ah,” Paul says. “How long do you think you’re going to do that? Because I sort of… I was supposed to go home tomorrow. My flight… Can’t Primo just… Drive me back, and _keep a low profile… later_?”

 _“He’s hurt,”_ Francesco says. _“Primo. My father told me to bring you food.”_ He puts the bag on the table and looks at him expectantly, but although Paul had been eyeing the bread since Francesco arrived, the bread in the bag and the pack of cigarettes in Francesco’s shirt pocket, he’s still puzzling out Francesco’s words.

“Wait, he’s hurt?”

Francesco pulls a face that could mean anything at all. In fact, it’s possible he could have picked up that practiced carelessness from Primo. There’s something about his whole look, the heeled boots, the flared trousers, the dark turtleneck, that’s reminiscent of Primo, what Primo might have looked like at seventeen, without the violent blue gaze. Francesco’s eyes are black and impossible to read.

“Francesco.”

 _“Don’t worry. It’s all under control. Eat,”_ he insists, putting the bread out on the table, and some cheese, and a can of ravioli in tomato sauce. 

“I don’t… How hurt is he? _Where is he hurt? Is it bad?_ ”

 _“It’s family business,”_ Francesco tells him, still with that same, untroubled gaze, and Paul briefly wonders if that’s how they talk to the wives of men who get shot or stabbed while working for the mafia - or to their children, with that faintly patronising tone like they don’t think you’re old enough to understand.

No, they’d likely be more upfront with the family. At best, Paul is some sort of troublesome mistress.

 _“My father says he’ll come to get you,”_ Francesco says. _“When things calm down, he’ll bring you back to Rome.”_

“I want to see Primo,” Paul says, but Francesco just shakes his head like he’s being unreasonable, and when Paul tries to follow him out, he pushes him firmly back. Paul glances at the rifle in his hand and doesn’t try again.

“It’s sort of my fault, isn’t it?” he says. “I fucked you up. I think I’m very good at fucking things up.”

Francesco doesn’t seem to understand him, but Paul figures it doesn’t matter.

Maybe Primo is dead and they won’t tell him. Maybe he’s currently dying. Paul smokes half of the cigarettes in Francesco’s pack, sitting on a rocky outcrop above the house, fingers playing with loose gravel and snow. There’s something daunting about the indifference of the mountains, but it grounds him, too, like it had four years ago on the rare occasions when they let him sit outside. The boundless woods, the boundless sky. Maybe if Primo is dead they’ll come and kill him too.

Likelier than not though, Leonardo will just show up with a beleaguered expression and drive him back to the airport and they’ll never tell him what happened.

He smokes the rest of the cigarettes in front of the fire, eating the ravioli out of the can, and he hasn’t moved by the time a car comes up the path, sitting there hugging his knees and dumping ash all over himself as he wipes his cheeks. When Primo walks in, he stays where he is, staring up at him in surprise first and then with a frown of disapproval - at having been made to feel things he didn't mean to, following trains of thought he’d rather have watched depart without him, and for a long moment, neither of them says anything.

He had thought about Paul, in brief stinging snatches, as they dug the bullet out of his shoulder on the veterinarian’s operating table, the overhead lights humming and flickering in a way that made Primo feel privately nauseous. He didn’t picture some trite scene where Paul clutched his hand and pressed a cloth to his sweating brow, but rather the boy looking haughtily at him and saying, _A vet, huh – I hope he does a better job on you than he did on me,_ and that was oddly comforting.

Then, afterwards, laying low at Leonardo’s house while Regina changed his bandages in a reluctant, motherly way that she couldn’t seem to help, he had thought about that big crumbling townhouse he owned, and how probably, if he let him, Paul would gleefully spend Primo’s money filling it with expensive modern art and plants and awful tie-dye wall hangings. It wasn’t necessarily something he wanted, but it was a thought he allowed himself to entertain, purely because he half-expected Paul to be gone by the time he managed to make it back up the mountain.

But here he is, looking up at him, his eyes ghostly pale in the dim cabin light, his face set in a familiar expression like he can’t seem to make up his mind whether he wants to slap Primo or kiss him, knowing full well that he won’t do either, because what he really wants is for Primo to decide for him.

Well too bad. Primo’s too tired to play that game, and the hole in his shoulder hurts like the devil, like he can feel his bones grinding over each other whenever he moves.

“ _Is there any coffee?_ ” he asks, shrugging stiffly out of his jacket and tossing it onto the back of the armchair.

Paul stares at him. “What?”

“ _Coffee. I’m exhausted_.”

“That’s all you have to say?” Paul unfolds his long legs, rakes his hair angrily out of his face as he stands. “You’re gone for three nights and nobody will tell me anything about what’s happened to you, and you just… _What do you think this is?_ You think I’m just playing housewife for you up here? Make your own damn coffee!”

“Oi!” He grabs hold of Paul’s arm as the boy tries to storm past him. “ _Who the fuck do you think you are?_ ” But Paul sticks his chin out, looks at him like he knows exactly who he thinks he is.

Primo’s just left his men to fend for themselves, driven two hours leaning on his bad shoulder like he wanted to feel the ache of it, like he wanted some punishment for feeling anything at all, and it wasn’t all for nothing, he’s going to get something of what he came for, backing Paul up against the wall, hands on his hips, as the boy cries out, “Jesus, I thought you were dead!”, striking his fist against Primo’s chest. But Primo must let something slip then, some quirk of his facial muscles that gives him away, because Paul stills, his hands resting below Primo’s collarbones, hesitantly now.

“Is that where you…?”

Primo makes some noncommittal sound, and slowly Paul reaches for the buttons on his shirt, opening the collar wider to reveal the wad of gauze and wrapping taped to his shoulder. Already there are spots of red beginning to seep through, although in the dark it seems a muddier brown. If there’s trouble with the wound, Primo knows he’ll have to go back to town sooner rather than later, but Paul is looking cautiously at him, holding his gaze as he leans down to kiss the edge of the bandages.

He’s been crying, Primo can see that now, as Paul straightens back up and the firelight picks out the tracks on his cheeks. Primo’s never had anyone cry over him before, not even his mother (and what would have been the point in that? She knew the kind of life she was bringing him into, any tears she had for that had already been shed before he was born.) He doesn’t know what to do with this, and perhaps that’s why he simply lets it happen, lets Paul kiss him again, all over his shoulder and then his chest and his stomach and his hips, easing Primo’s trousers down over his thighs as he takes him in his mouth, like he really has been starving up here alone in the mountains. It’s easy not to think about anything, with Paul’s tongue running down the length of him, his own fingers buried in that fiery hair that drives him wild just getting a handful of it. Afterwards, when they’re both gasping and Paul is looking up at him with his pretty mouth all flushed, the only thing on his mind is taking the boy to bed, feeling him melt against him as Primo slides a hand between his legs, moaning recklessly in that way that’s become so familiar these last two weeks, as much as the wind in the pines, or the growl of the engine as his car battles the mountain roads.

It’s only when they’re lying silently in the cold dark, Paul’s head pillowed on his other shoulder, that Primo confronts the thought that’s been bothering him. Sitting alone and tear-stained, Paul had looked like he belonged here: one of the frightened people left behind to wait and wonder while their families are cut down, and the truth is, Primo doesn’t want anything that belongs here. He never has.

And Paul, what does he want? Only the things he can’t have – no doubt why he wanted a wife, why he wants money whenever it’s denied to him, and why he always comes stumbling back to Primo’s hands hoping for cigarettes or coke or orange slices when he knows Primo will hold them just out of reach. Paul has enjoyed this: the seclusion of the wilderness and their strange little domestic play-acting (he has enjoyed it, hasn’t he? Primo can tell from the way he fucks) because he knew he’d have to give it up. But if Primo asked him to stay (ordered him to stay, _demanded_ he stay), Paul would find a way to hitch a ride out of here, to do anything rather than what he’s told.

It’s as though each of them is holding a knife to the other’s throat. One wrong move and one or both of them will be gone, messy and bloody.

In the end, it’s Paul who moves first, and in the coming weeks Primo will think he may as well have sliced him right open.

“I can’t say it.” His voice is quiet in the dark. “I’ve got Martine and my son and all of it, so I can’t, I can’t say it.” He’s shaking slightly, shivering perhaps, and he pulls the blanket up around them, although he continues to shudder against Primo’s side. “But I do, you know. Feel that way. About you. I think I do.”

And that does it, Primo thinks; he has to get rid of him. He can’t be dealing with this, not when Calabria is on a knife-edge, when all his attention needs to be on the business, not drifting back up here to the bitter coffee and Paul’s scratchy jumper against his bare skin. He shouldn’t even be here now, shouldn’t have barked at Leonardo that he didn’t give a damn about splitting his bullet wound open on that long drive, shouldn’t have left his men, all because he thought if death was on the cards for him, he wanted it to be red hair and blue eyes emblazoned on the back of his eyelids as he went out. But what Paul’s talking about, this isn’t any kind of currency here. Better to let him scurry back to New York and his woman and his parties. Better to throw rocks at him like a stray dog until it learns to stop hanging around for scraps, just like Primo had done years ago on a different mountaintop. _Get out of the car, kid, we’re done here_.

(But somewhere underneath all that, he knows the boy has to go because if Primo were to let him have this, let him have something he wants, then surely Paul would just grow tired of loving him, as he grows tired of everything else.)

_“Come on, let’s go. You’ve got a plane to catch.”_

At first Paul only stares blankly at him, hair mussed with sleep, that worn jumper falling off his shoulder, but he rallies soon enough, gathering his things and taking them out to the car, and by the time Primo has finished his coffee, Paul is ready to go. 

Primo catches him taking a last look at the stone house as they drive away, and maybe it’s what prompts him to say, _“It belonged to my grandfather,”_ although he doesn’t know what he expects Paul to do with this information, delivered as it is after the fact of their stay. He’s running fully on coke, hoping it’ll carry him all the way to Rome and back, but quite aware that he might have to crash in town for the night, stopping at a doctor’s to get the wound dressed again.

Paul waits until they’ve come down from the mountain to say, “I can actually drive, you know?” But it’s another hundred kilometres before Primo does let him take the wheel, Paul glancing worriedly at him (“Man, are you sure you’re okay? You look…”) to which Primo kindly tells him to fuck off and leans his head against the window.

When he opens his eyes again he’s lying in the back of the car, his legs thrown over Paul’s knees, a soft pile under his head that turns out to be the boy’s jumper, still prickly with pine needles and branches and weeds from Paul’s walks around the house. Often enough he’d lost track of time up there, sketching birds or the passing clouds, and once Primo had found him asleep in the hollow of tangled roots.

Paul helps him lift his head and presents him with a pinch of coke. Primo inhales it, rubs his nose and tries to remember how he went from the front to the back of the car. Gives up.

“I’m not leaving you here like this,” Paul tells him. From his stubborn tone and the slope of his mouth, it’s obvious he’s been mulling this over. “There has to be a doctor I can take you to. A mafia doctor?”

It’s then that Primo gets the idea. A simple solution to this entire situation, the Getty problem he’s been dragging behind him all these years or, if he has to be honest - and if not now, when - the problem he’s been crawling back to on both knees with his hands joined in prayer, over and over again, for another glimpse of Paul’s red hair, to once again feel the nervous grip of Paul’s long legs around his hips, to hear him moan like he doesn’t care who might hear him, like maybe he wants to be heard.

“Go,” he orders, and all but tosses him out on the side of the road, somewhere on the outskirts of Rome, slipping him a couple bills for a taxi, closing his fingers around the bullet they’d pried from his shoulder: _“Here. A souvenir.”_

Paul doesn’t seem to have any fight left in him, standing on that roadside as the wind tangles his hair, and he doesn’t say anything, not as Primo drops his bag at his feet, nor when he kisses him, wanting to take the memory of Paul’s mouth away with him. 

He’d rather it had happened differently. They’ve practiced those exits over the years and Primo has a lasting fondness for their dramatic fall-outs, frantic collisions on the hood of the Alfetta, in the bathroom of a club, music thrumming through their bones, on the couch of a hotel room, Paul moaning insults in his ear. This isn’t remotely as satisfying, Paul staring forlornly at him in the mirror as he drives off, the last word he’d said a whispered plea - "Primo _"._

On his return, Primo goes straight to the village and spends two days mostly out of it at Leonardo’s house, snapping at whoever gets within range until Regina confronts him about it, warning him he can weep and whine about the pain if he needs to, but if he keeps taking it out on them she’ll drive him back to his house herself and wait from across the street to be there when they come to finish him off.

As soon as he’s got his thoughts back in order, Primo summons Leonardo, and once they’re done covering the matters at hand – people to bribe and people to kill, the arrangement of a wedding between one of Primo’s cousins and the dead boss’ niece – Primo tells him to send a message to New York. 

“Make it believable,” he warns, and refuses to meet Leonardo’s eyes as Leonardo presents him with the letter, two lines typed at the top of a page that merely read, _I am very sorry, Paul. È morto per le ferite. L._

On his return, Primo goes straight to the village and it’s only months later that he drives up to his grandfather’s house and finds Paul’s notebooks, five or six of them slipped under the mattress, the pages gone damp in places. Drawings of the house and its surroundings, birds and the coffee pot, and pines reduced to their simplest expression, as columns of chevrons in the margins. The illustrated screenplay for a movie Primo can’t even begin to decipher, except the villain has clear eyes and an aquiline nose and a tendency to shoot people on sight. Every so often Primo finds his name scrawled across the top of the pages, along with pointed comments in Italian, _Primo was late, Primo tried to teach me how to shoot, Primo burnt the coffee, Primo caught a hare, Primo fell asleep in front of the fire,_ a simple, pared-down story of those two weeks that somehow seems far less believable than Paul’s crazy movie script.

 _I’ve been thinking about his hands all morning,_ Paul had written.

_The smell of the pines / the smell of coffee / the smell of the bed._

_I could get used to this._

Paul chops his hair off. 

As he looks at his face in the mirror, pale and long, he wonders what he’ll say when they ask him about it, the artists and enfants terribles of New York City: will he tell them that he’s in mourning, that he’s lost something he doesn’t know how to replace - something he wasn’t even sure he had until it vanished - the certainty that as long as Primo lived they would keep crossing paths like planets on intersecting orbits, would keep doing it again and again until the day they collided and died from the impact? Will he lift his head from the table, wiping powder off his nose, long enough to say that he’s never going to kiss anyone, ever again, only to then make out with whoever decides to take this ridiculous statement as a challenge? 

In the end, though, no one asks him about it. “Daring,” Paul hears. “Darling, it suits you.” And: “In art as in life, one has to know how to start a trend”.


	9. New York (the Dakota)

Summer is on the turn. A coolness settles over New York in the evenings now and Paul is grateful for it. He was growing tired of the way the city trapped the heat and forced everybody to wade through it together.

He gets brunch with his mother, which is mainly an excuse to drop off Balthazar, who has been tearing around the apartment and driving Paul crazy. (Martine has gone to a yoga retreat in Switzerland with her sister and their friends, who are not Paul’s friends, so he didn’t particularly mind not being invited.)

“You’re getting thin again,” his mother says, not unkindly, as she leans across the table to cup his cheek. Inevitably her fingers stray to the cropped curls of his hair, longer now and vibrant with the aftermath of summer, but still nothing like it used to be. The act of cutting it seemed to upset her more than anyone else. Paul hadn’t loved that. It was his unhappiness, she wasn’t owed some part of it, not this time.

“I’m fine,” he tells her, and both of them go back to sipping their coffee, too tired with the weight of their own private griefs to prod at something they know is untrue.

He sells a painting he doesn’t much like to a friend of a friend. He tries growing flowers on the roof of his building but he forgets to water them, and comes back a week later to find them desiccated. He declines a birthday invite from the Kennedys, goes out with Andy Warhol and a few of their mutual friends instead, winds up at Studio 54 in time to crash a perfume launch party by Yves Saint Laurent, whose white scarf he steals and wears around his head, and Paloma Picasso calls him “a perfect young savage.” So the world keeps turning. But the music and the champagne is an insult; even out on the street, Paul finds the noise of the cars and the crowds and the flashing neon signs unbearable at times. Everything proclaiming: this is life. As if the world needs any more of it.

Late September brings the first real cold snap, and Paul climbs gratefully back into his old sweaters and thick socks. He takes his son for a walk in the park, the two of them wandering in a strange path trying to step on the crunchiest looking leaves, their noses turning pink with the biting north wind rolling in from the Atlantic.

“That’s come all the way over from Europe,” Paul explains. “It says your mom misses you.”

Balthazar looks unimpressed.

“It’s true, man, she’s sitting outside right now missing you so bad, so when the wind changes direction, you tell it something to take back to her, yeah?”

It’s something Paul’s been doing for months now, whispering things into whatever wind is heading east, and hoping they’ll find their mark, some now-static spot thousands of miles away in the Mediterranean. It makes him feel better, sometimes. Other times it makes him feel insane, and so it would be a great help if someone else was doing it too, even if only his infant son. 

Just as they’re leaving, Paul thinks he catches something out of the corner of his eye, someone standing by the railings watching them. The right height and build and everything, but when he turns to look properly there is nobody there, as he knew there wouldn’t be.

He thinks he’s seen him before, of course. In coffee shops or in the background of parties or smoking lazily on a fire escape staircase overhead. Once he followed a man for nearly twenty minutes because the stranger’s walk reminded him of Primo’s cocky stride, the slight swing of his hips, and the broadness of his shoulders. Paul had sort of known all along that it wasn’t him, but at the time just wrapping himself up in the pretence of it had been… well, not comforting, exactly. Maybe the same way a bump of coke is comforting.

A few weeks after he received Leonardo’s letter, he toyed with the idea of calling his father, one broken heart to another. He got as far as dialling the UK extension and then promptly hung up. What advice would his old man be able to give him anyway? _Go on a massive bender. That’s the Getty grief cure-all_. Well, Paul had already tried that, several times. _Go out and find someone kind enough to try and get whoever it is off your mind. Maybe you can marry them instead._

The worst thing, really, is that he can’t talk about it at all. Not with anybody. Who could possibly untangle that mess? Not even Ariadne, who phones once a week to chat about movies she has seen or cities she’s visited. The usual. She always asks how he’s doing, but she’s happy, and Paul doesn’t want to pull her into his own unhappiness. He senses, too, that she is a little bit relieved not to be pulled into it either. 

No. The worst thing is that Primo is dead. He’s dead, and Paul had told him how he felt, and now what? Love like an over-abundance of fruit left unpicked, to turn rotten and be trodden into the ground by passing feet. He feels sick with it.

He lies in bed later than he should, cocooned in the warmth of his duvet on the cold autumn morning, his fist clasped tight around the bullet they pried out of Primo’s shoulder, hoping it will leave a dent in his palm. He thinks idly of summer, of grand Roman hotels, of light streaming through muslin curtains as Primo leaned over him on some extravagant four-poster bed. Paul liked to be kissed in the mornings, and if his mood was right, Primo would indulge him before saying, “Basta” and pushing him off firmly. Then Paul would whine and grip him by the hips as he tried to move away, and kiss him in places civilised people did not kiss one another, which was fitting, since neither of them had a civilised bone in their body. Especially not in those days. Perhaps I’ve grown up since then, Paul thinks, and that night he goes out and drinks Sauvignon Blanc out of one of Dolly Parton’s boots.

Martine returns, but only long enough to pack a suitcase for Balthazar and inform Paul that she’s taking their son to visit her parents. Before she leaves, she lies down tentatively on top of the covers and strokes the side of his head. “We’ll miss you,” she says, as though this is some invitation he has declined, rather than her wanting to put a little distance between them for a while. He can’t blame her for that. His mood has its own black orbit, and he loves her too much to want her sucked into it. But then, as she’s getting up to go, she calls him _Paol_ in that tender way she used to whenever he was being sweet and foolish in his teens, and he has to bury his head under the pillows until she’s gone.

His mother, who has been staying with friends for the season, leaves town as well, headed for San Francisco. Paul gets a postcard from her on his birthday, which he spends alone, painting in the living room. It’s always the same scene now: a jagged mountainside overwhelmed with pines, which seem to creep closer every time to the crude little house perched on the edge, threatening to engulf it. And whenever the painting is almost finished, he will add the vague indication of a figure and a plume of blue cigarette smoke vanishing into the darkness of the trees. Then he will throw the whole thing out. In fact, he is on the brink of doing so when there is a knock at the door. It takes him a moment to extricate himself from his huge sheets of paper, to wipe the worst of the paint off his hands (onto his jeans), so that by the time he opens the door, he finds himself staring down the empty hallway of his apartment complex.

Empty, except for a single packet of Messis Summa Italian cigarettes, and a note that reads _Buon compleanno_.

He runs down to the lobby, skidding breathless and barefoot down the stairs, but of course there is nobody there.

He gets through the packet of MS in two days, smoking them in bed, and when he lies down to sleep at night, the sheets smell achingly familiar. After the last one, he smoothes out the packet and tucks it into his jacket where he keeps the bullet from Primo’s shoulder, and although it doesn’t weigh anything, he walks around for the next few days feeling like he has to adjust to the addition of it.

What does it mean, if it means anything at all? Everyone in Italy smoked those same damn cigarettes, and when he receives a party invite from an actress friend of his, many of whose soirées he had attended in Rome, he figures, _Yeah, that makes sense_. Probably just a joke from one of his friends, one of the old crowd from his Italian days.

Indeed, that evening everyone’s minds seem to be on all things Italian. A body was found dismembered in Manhattan’s Little Italy, and even the meekest of the bohemian party guests seem thrilled by the grisly news. “Definitely a mafia hit,” somebody says, and Paul’s actress friend scoffs.

“Like you’d know what a mafia hit looks like.”

“It’s that gang out of Harlem, I heard they cut off people’s ears and noses.”

Somebody else shoves him and glances pointedly at Paul, and an awkward quiet descends, until the actress says, “Well, I suppose you would know, wouldn’t you, Getty? Didn’t you use to have a friend in the… you know? That guy with the coke. What was his name again?”

Paul tucks his short curls behind his good ear. “I don’t remember,” he says, and leans down to snort a line off the glass coffee table. 

“You do! That Italian guy you were with all summer – when was it, last year? Primo somebody, that was it. Whatever happened to him?”

Someone else leans over and strokes Paul’s shoulder. “He probably doesn’t want to talk about it.” But something about their manner grates with him; he’s grown tired of everyone deciding how he’s feeling. Their gentleness makes him want to be ungentle in return.

“Primo Nizzuto,” he says. What harm can it do now? “He’s dead.” And that about brings the party to a close.

He has run the details of that previous summer over in his mind, like his father watching Kodachrome videos on his projector and letting the film rolls burn up and melt at the end. Perhaps that’s how he is able to forget what happened the last time he said Primo’s name out loud like that.

A week after his birthday, he tags along to a house party at The Dakota in Manhattan. The huge drawing room is packed with people dancing and drinking and practically making love to one another, and Paul is swept up into it from the moment he arrives, pulled into the crowd where he lets someone pour champagne into his mouth, and snorts a line off somebody else’s wrist. It’s good coke, not the kind he’s used to in New York, not the kind he’s had in a long time, but he doesn’t think anything of it when someone puts on a Queen track with a bassline he can sink his teeth into, and he loses himself for a little while in the music, hands in the air, his face tilted up to catch the light from the mirrorball on the ceiling.

It’s only afterwards that he realises he’s no longer wearing his jacket. What starts as a casual drifting around looking for it quickly becomes a more frantic search as every new room turns up nothing. “It’s important,” he tries to explain to a very drunk girl wearing a full length ball gown. His Italian cigarette box is still folded up neatly in the pocket. The bullet, the only thing he has left of Primo, is trapped in the lining. But the girl just laughs and vanishes into the throng of dancers.

Paul pushes his way out onto the long balcony, sinking into that familiar feeling of being once again on the outside of everybody else. The night air is viciously cold against his bare arms, and he shivers, gazing down at the courtyard, the light from the windows reflected in pink and orange in the puddles below. There’s sleet in the air, growing heavier, settling in his hair, and someone at the other end of the balcony seems to take this as their cue to go back inside.

And that’s all it is: Paul stumbling to get out of this stranger’s way, and then the briefest glimpse of familiar hands turning up the collar of a long dark coat against the bad weather, as the rain hammers on the high gable roof.

“Jesus…”

He should be furious. He will be furious, later, when the weight of what Primo has done has properly sunk in. But after all of it – the ache his chest, the weary mornings unable to do anything but curl up and bruise himself with memories, the frantic drinking and drug-taking to chase those away, the painting, the sulking, the hopeless bargaining with some divine influence that he doesn’t even believe in, and for what, a man who put a gun to his head more times than he could count? A man who saved his life, too. After all that, the only outcome Paul can bear now is to throw his arms around him.

As far as everybody is concerned, Primo is here to visit a cousin. He’d only met Giuseppe once before, when the man had come to Calabria for a wedding and had turned up his nose at much of the ceremony, at the men’s simple suits and the proximity of farm animals, complaining it all smelled of manure and that the straw and dirt got everywhere. He’d had his eye on the local girls, though, and for a while there’d been talk that he’d take one of them back with him, much like his grandfather had taken his young bride along when he’d emigrated. In the end, Giuseppe had returned to New York and, like his two brothers before him, he’d married a girl there, Carlotta, who doesn’t seem to mind the small size of their flat, four rooms squeezed in right above their grocery store, where you can hardly turn around without bumping into furniture or one of their three young children. The first few nights, Primo joins her in the kitchen for a cigarette after the kids have been put to bed and Giuseppe has fallen asleep straight at the table, but he gives up when Giuseppe walks in on them and seems determined to be suspicious. Primo isn’t quite secure enough in his position here to tell him that he’s learned more of the ways of this city in the span of a handful of cigarettes with his wife than he has in two days of following Giuseppe as he lurches ponderously from the store to the corner of the street and back.

As for Giuseppe’s disdain of Calabria _(“The problem isn’t the country itself - the land is beautiful - it’s the smell. The smell of life in Calabria”)_ , Primo finds it rather hypocritical, considering the smell of cabbage that permeates the entire building, the smell of rotting fish that permeates the street with the proximity of the fish market where he’s spent more time than he cares to in the past week getting “acquainted” with people. There’ll be no immediate business to be done here, just a brokering of ties for what might turn out to be future gain, might turn out to be nothing. When the mafiosi around here talk of home, they mean Sicilia. He doesn’t have much that will be of interest to them at present, but give it a few years.

Maybe more. _A decade or two,_ Leonardo said the last time they spoke. Something for Francesco to worry about someday. Primo has never been any good at waiting, and it almost gets him into trouble, the two men he’s brought to watch his back vanishing between one street and the next, a good shove propelling him into an alleyway where someone holds a knife to his throat. A crisp order to stand down. _Remember your place, goat farmer._ That’s what they’ve taken to calling him, _l’allevatore di capre_ , the sort of infuriating nickname that has a tendency to stick. _If you kill someone over there,_ Leonardo had warned him, _you will be fucked beyond any help we can give you. So please. Keep it in your pants for once, will you?_

What family Primo does have in New York would step in if he got in trouble, but Giuseppe and his brothers wouldn’t be much good against the might of the Five Families. As for the two men who came along with him from Calabria, Renzo and Gino, nephews of Regina that Leonardo had recommended to him on account of them having _“a good head on their shoulders on top of a solid pair of fists,”_ they tumble into that alleyway seconds after Primo’s assailant has left. They’d been distracted by a store front, _“Cheap leather jackets, a bargain…”_ _(“When you said they had a good head and a good pair of fists, did you mean one head and two fists for the two of them?”_ Primo shouts at Leonardo that afternoon, having made the costly call for the sole purpose of this tongue-lashing, even though his anger itself feels more subdued than it was in Italy. Distorted by distance and impotence.)

So Primo throws a few lines to be hauled in later, in a week or in five years, and he leaves the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge for a few days, venturing into Manhattan where he tracks down a few people he knew from Rome. Not any Italians, but the rich crowd of drifting dilettantes that Paul used to fray with, patrons of the arts who, whether by coincidence or by design, are also patrons of cocaine. Primo has enough money at hand that he’s bought some good coke, the sort that will remind these people why they like to see him at their wasteful get-togethers.

Of course Paul has been on his mind. New York isn’t the right place for him, Paul of the dolce vita and the farniente, Paul who loves nothing more than to stare at the sky and forget time is passing him by. The city is wide enough and confused enough that Primo could easily spend a year here and never run into the boy, provided he also steers clear of these uptown parties, but Primo’s never been one to behave. On Paul’s birthday he pays him a visit, drops off cigarettes on his doorstep and wanders up to the roof of Paul’s building for a smoke, gazing down at the busy street below, tapping the ashes into a box of wilted flowers. It was easier to keep his distance when there was an ocean between them. When a young gallery manager gives him the address of the party, Primo has to ask her, “Paul Getty, he will be there?”

She gives him a sideways look, purple mascara so thick on her lashes that her eyes look like thistles.

“Sì, if you want him to be. It can be arranged. If your treats are as good as they were in Rome.”

Primo considers it. Seeing Paul again would be like that first time he went to Rome, walking along the palazzi, getting glimpses of chandeliers and wall hangings through an open window, of the delicate curve of a statue’s back through the iron grate of a garden, unable as of yet to force his way into those softly-lit interiors, to throw statues to the ground and overturn lacquered shelves as he searches for cash and jewels and solid gold, whatever he might sell for a good price. Looking at Paul and wishing he’d been born rich - that he could set him on fire - that he could make love to him like he used to fantasise about those houses, hatred impossible to disentangle from desire, thinking, _Someday, someday, I will have you._

“No,” he says. _“I don’t need to see him.”_

Of course Paul comes anyways.

The party is in a gabled building overlooking Central Park. Primo still isn’t used to the scale of things here, though he doesn’t feel diminished, or angry, or resentful, the way he once had in Rome. It’s easier to be inconspicuous on this side of town, where there aren’t ten pairs of eyes following him at all times, and once he’s inside the apartment it all falls back into place, rivers of wine and people making out, passing out, dancing in the golden light, a maze of delicate lampshades and glass tables and modern art, bare elbows and sculpted blond curls, the faintest curl of the lips meant to convey a feigned disinterest in all matters at hand, in the couple rutting in the velvet embrace of the sofa or in the girl holding a hand against her profusely bleeding nose, red droplets on the sequins of her dress and on the marble floor. And yet they couldn’t exist anywhere but here, all these people. Their life is tethered to these parties as if they had a drip planted in their arm, feeding them a steady stream of drugs and champagne.

Paul in the midst of it all, letting the music toss him around until it casts him down, shipwrecked in the pink tulle folds of a woman’s gown. Paul drunk and high, ecstatic, offered to all hands much as had been in that hotel room at the Residenza, even if tonight, no one seems foolish enough to try and get a taste. Primo sweeps past him and out onto the balcony, the back of his fingers brushing against Paul’s cropped hair. (“You don’t understand,” Paul is saying, with nothing of his usual, laid-back tone. His voice is shaking. “It’s the only thing I’ve got left…”).

Maybe it shouldn’t be such a surprise when Paul follows him out seconds later, clearly underdressed for the weather, hugging his bony frame as he peers up at the sky. 

It’s the way of all drugs, Primo thinks: you expect a pinch of it will tide you over, and then you’re waking up in a cold sweat, fingers itching for a boy’s long hands, mouth parched for a kiss.

Paul snatches him as he’s about to go back in - isn’t it the way Primo has behaved all evening, one foot in, one foot out, dancing around the edge of this gathering like he used to in Rome, always on the outside looking in, with the distance granted by mockery, the self-satisfaction that comes from being at peace with one’s vices - and Primo thinks _No_ even as he lets Paul burrow himself into the warmth of his coat, his arms fast around Primo’s waist. Paul’s neck is bare under his fingers and he shivers when Primo touches him.

_“What did you do to your hair, you idiot?”_


	10. New York (Paul's apartment)

Sometimes Paul can make himself forget things. He got good at it, in those long, awful months five years ago. The taste of Angelo Calati’s blood in his mouth, the smell of gasoline, the feeling of Berto's body turning cold underneath him as he lay crushed against it in the back of the car – he could push it all to the back of his mind in exchange for Primo’s hands on his hips, in his hair, between his legs, the rare possibility that Primo might lean down and kiss him afterwards, and Paul would feel, just for a moment, like that was enough. It was enough that somebody wanted him, even if violently, even if against both their better judgements.

It’s the same now.

He burrows into Primo’s coat like he’s trying to climb inside it, out of the cold, digging his chin into Primo’s shoulder, arms tight around his waist. _Just give me a minute_ , he thinks, to the panic and confusion threatening in the back of his throat. _Just a minute_. Primo makes a comment about his hair, his fingers tracing (too lightly) along the back of Paul’s neck. “I cut it off,” Paul says, and he wishes his immediate thought wasn't: _But I’ll grow it back if you tell me to_. It is, perhaps, the longest they have ever stood still together.

At last Primo puts some distance between them, stepping back as he says impatiently, “ _Come on,_ ” and steers him back into the party. There is Paul’s jacket, draped around the shoulders of some bronze statue. How had he not noticed it before? But then, if he had, he might not have gone out onto the balcony. It seems strange to him now that he’d been so afraid of losing it – a distant kind of feeling, as though he is remembering it happening to somebody else – and yet he’s glad to have it back, to nestle into its worn fabric and feel the familiar weight of Primo’s bullet caught in the lining. Does such a thing still have value now, the bullet? The same way the scars around his ear are no less real just because he has sculpted over them. A token to say he has come through something, or died trying.

Does one of them suggest leaving? Paul doesn’t remember either of them actually saying the words, they both just make for the door, then the staircase, then the lobby, and then they’re tumbling out into a freezing November night. “We should get a cab,” Paul says, but there are none, even as they walk on. There is only the light reflecting off the puddles that ripple every time a car drives past, the sleet falling fast and ghostly in the beams of street-lamps, the space between their shoulders that Paul can’t help being aware of. He is deathly cold in his thin shirt and threadbare jacket, and water is already leaking through his boots, not made for tramping over wet ground and dead leaves stuck to the sidewalk. (Primo’s shoes don’t look a lot better; he cuts a strangely sombre figure in his dark coat with the turned-up collar. He looks, Paul realises, rather like an American.)

Instinctively Paul has been heading for home – they’re still in Manhattan, after all, the walk is not impossible – but it’s only now it occurs to him this might not be the wisest idea.

“ _You want something to drink?_ ” he suggests. There’s a bar across the street, the kind of upscale place where it’s always dark and they put a little lamp on every table. He’s still pretty wasted, but groggily so, with the cold doing its level best to smack some sobriety into him, and he would sooner not face the rest of the night completely lucid. Whatever happens, he’d like at least to be able to say afterwards: _Hey, it wasn’t my fault. I was hammered_.

Primo glances towards the bar, his hair blowing across his face, and he looks just as impatient as he sounded earlier. Paul hesitates; he really doesn’t know what to do with him if he declines. He can’t take Primo back to his apartment – Martine’s things are there, _his son’s_ things are there – but he’s hardly going to leave him here. After all this, he’d rather throw himself under a bus.

It’s some minor relief, then, when Primo kicks his heel against the curb, tugs his coat tighter and mutters, “ _Sure. Maybe they’ll have some fucking central heating_.”

“Allora,” Paul says, when they’re seated at a table, the privacy of the low lighting like some kind of dark velvet they’re wrapped up in. What he means to say next he has no idea, so he’s almost grateful when Primo cuts across him,

“ _Why did you cut your hair, eh?_ ”

Paul could give him a hundred different answers. _Because grief strips us down. Because death reminds us we don’t have control over anything, except the decisions we make. Because I knew you would hate it, and maybe I wanted you to come back and tell me yourself_.

“ _It was angelic_ ,” Primo says, although it sounds more like a complaint than a compliment, and he directs it at his tumbler of whiskey rather than Paul directly.

Paul sniffs. “Did you know the angels in all those paintings are impossible? If human beings had wings, they’d have to be at least twice as big, or they’d never get off the ground.”

“ _But they’re not human beings. They’re divine_.”

“Yeah, well. If I ever was that, I’m not anymore.”

He takes a sip of his wine, delaying the inevitable. Jesus, he’ll have to say something sooner or later. One of them will, and he already knows it won’t be Primo. This isn’t the first death the man has faked (the last one, of course, had been Paul’s) and he’d walked away from that without having to answer any questions, hadn’t he? It was screwed up, the whole thing is still screwed up, and if this isn’t the action to finally shake Paul by the shoulders and tell him the wake the fuck up, then what will be?

But he watches Primo take a packet of cigarettes from out of his coat, the movement of his hands, the familiar shadows playing across his knuckles, his long fingers, and instead Paul asks, “ _What are you doing here?_ ”

Primo taps a cigarette against the table and looks Paul in the eye for the first time that evening. There are things you don’t expect to miss about a person: the kind of gaze that makes you feel as though someone is pouring cold water down your back, the shadows under their eyes, the exact shape of their fingernails, the way they tilt their head back when they talk so that they can look down at you…

“ _Do you really want to know, or do you want to skip to the end?_ ”

“What happens at the end, you kick me out of another car? I’m tired of going round in circles, man.” Paul frowns. “What, you won’t even give me a straight answer about that now?”

Primo fixes him with that crooked smile that used to mean he was laughing at your expense, or pleased with himself, or both. Then he leans over and kisses him, deeply, one finger hooked under Paul’s chin, his mouth distinctly warm after the chill of the street, and Paul sighs against his lips despite himself. It’s quick and the room is dark, so nobody sees; all around them life shivers, glitters, moves on.

Paul tells the anger beating under his breastbone _Yeah, I’ve kept you waiting too long_ , but what’s one more night added to the heap of bones these last nine months have been? Love endures more than anger, more than bones. Whether desires or bodies, they have always been good, the two of them, at burying things together.

_“How do you think it ends?”_ Primo asks.

Paul must not have expected the question, because he looks startled.

“Oh. I don’t know.” 

Maybe he hasn’t noticed, but each time he tries to evade Primo’s gaze, his eyes fall to Primo’s hands instead. There’s little doubt as to where this is all headed, the only question being what manner of bed it will be, in some hotel probably, a half-dressed, drunken fumble, Primo forgetting himself and kissing Paul’s hair, Paul breathing out some confession of love he’ll later convince himself he never made, not here in New York and not the six or seven times it happened before, as far back as that war-time tunnel in Calabria. It’s not so much a cycle that they keep reviving as a maddening spiral, because it used to be that Primo was able to dissociate his prospects from Paul, to put business first and the boy second, and now here he is, having ditched that party because he wanted them to be alone, sitting in the kind of soulless, late-night establishment that America is so very fond of, because he followed a boy’s bright hair like he might have a firefly, hands extended to catch it, heedless of whatever might lie in his path, exposed roots and rocks or holes in the ground.

“I guess I always assumed it’d be a sad ending,” Paul says. “Un finale triste? I don’t like the idea that I’m going to outlive you, you know? With the kind of life you… I can’t believe you did this to me. You should tell Leonardo, the next time this happens, he’ll have to show me your body.” When he’s done with his little tirade, he repeats it in Italian, still febrile but with less determination maybe, his hand knocking into his wine glass at the end. Primo stills the glass before it falls, raising his eyebrows at him.

_“What, you’ll follow the cortege, dressed all in black, wearing a veil, like a real Italian widow? You’ll cry a river of tears, get down on your knees to kiss the coffin?”_

Paul glares at him. Primo couldn’t say what makes him relent. Maybe it’s that glimpse at depths of hurt behind Paul’s tight-lipped scowl that he’s got no desire to sound, unless it’s this talk of death at the table, which would surely have earned him a proper beating if his father and uncle hadn’t been six feet underground. _A bad omen,_ they’d have said, and years after their deaths, having had a hand in it in both cases - watching his father’s spasms on the kitchen floor instead of running for help, holding the pillow in place as he shot his uncle in the face - Primo wonders if he’s turning into them, too, making fun of God and then signing himself.

 _“I’ll let Leonardo know,”_ he says, the amusement drained out of his voice. _“If I die, Paol is allowed to kiss me before they put me in the ground.”_

In all those months since he told Leonardo to write that letter, he’d never questioned his decision. It was the right thing to do: kicking the boy to the curb before his hair could soak up any more golden sunlight, before his jumper could gather more pine needles and weeds between its stitches. Yet the thought does occur to him, briefly in this quiet bar in the midst of a city that should be a better fit for them (sleepless and reckless and high on its own polluted fumes) that he’d give anything to step out of this place and into his grandfather’s cabin, to push Paul down on an old mattress that still retains the shape of his body months after he’s left, as if the house itself hadn’t wanted him to go.

“Hey, do you want to come back to my place?” 

Paul sounds nervous. The fiddling of his hands on the table is familiar, shapes flashing between his fingers that would have been animals if the lamp on their table had cast a proper shadow on the wall.

“Or we could just…”

“Sì,” Primo says, remembering the rooftop, how far removed he’d felt from the street below, the quieting knowledge of Paul’s nearby presence. It’s hardly a cabin in the mountains, or a palace in Rome, but he isn’t in the mood for that at present, for the Aspromonte or for marble pillars and the sort of bed you can drown in. Paul’s no-doubt messy apartment will do.

Outside Paul hails a cab as Primo waves a hand to the shadows behind him, giving Renzo and Gino a clear signal. _Get lost._

Paul’s apartment is indeed a mess. Primo’s seen goat pens kept more orderly than this: clothes strewn about on the floor; empty peanut butter jars full of paintbrushes and colourless water; flowerpots, shot glasses and even a woman’s plimsole used as ashtrays. Paul doesn’t turn the lights on, as if he hopes this will somehow conceal the worst of it, even as he trips over what appears to be a pair of rollerskates on his way through the door.

“I, uh…” Paul shrugs, wraps his arms around himself. “Didn’t get a chance to tidy up. Wasn’t expecting… Obviously.”

The whole place smells of Primo’s brand of cigarettes, which surprises him briefly, to encounter something of himself in this place that is so alien to him. But then there is something else, underneath that: a kind of lived-in, stale sort of scent, which shouldn’t be arousing, except that it reminds him viscerally of the Calati house – not just that bedroom, but the whole experience of it.

Late, lazy nights knocking back cheap wine and listening to the cicadas in the long grass, which seemed to creep daily towards the house, like it was trying to cut them off even further from the rest of the world. Offering Paul coke on his fingers, rubbing it on his gums to get that sleepy-eyed summer boy wild. Paul’s teenage infatuation, it had seemed back then, although they had both said childish things to each other in the heat of the moment, Paul’s steady stream of _We could go to Marrakesh_ nonsense, and that one time Primo said (with his hands buried in Paul’s hair, the boy’s clumsy, eager mouth between his legs), _You’re worth every damn dollar_. He remembers the golden hour that seemed to last forever, trapped there in the dip of those hills, catching in Paul’s tangled curls as the boy pulled his shirt up over his head down by the river, before it all began. He’d looked up just for a moment and caught Primo watching him, and there had passed between them some brief recognition, the way men like them have always recognised each other – not by anything so mundane as sexuality, but rather two people looking at one another and thinking, _You are just as starving as I am_.

Their lives weren’t good lives in those days, but things were simpler. Primo isn’t familiar enough with nostalgia so he wouldn’t call it that, the way he’s feeling now; it’s just plain old hunger to him, and the way Paul gasps softly as Primo takes hold of him by the waist, his quick, shallow breaths as he lifts a hand to curl it around the back of Primo’s neck, all seems to say he is hungry too.

“ _Poor boy_.” He smoothes Paul’s butchered hair back from his face. “ _You must get lonely here._ ”

“Is that your apology?” Everything seems blue-tinged in the dark, but Paul’s eyes are clear as glass; wide and nervous, even as his voice is hard.

Primo scoffs and kisses him. He feels Paul’s hand tighten on the back of his neck, while the rest of him goes slack in Primo’s arms. It’s easy, then, to lift him and carry him to the couch, Primo relishing the familiar burn in his muscles as he holds him, Paul already pulling down the collar of Primo’s shirt to kiss the bullet scar on his shoulder, over and over.

Primo has him on his back amongst sequin cushions and sheets of crumpled paper, Paul’s mouth inches from his own, moaning frantically, Primo swallowing the sound, always one hand in Paul’s hair. Perhaps they are childish when they speak this time as well. Or Paul speaks, like he’s been saving it all up for months, _Jesus Christ you’re good, sei bravo, sei bravo, shit I wanna marry you…_ , and Primo whispers promises in his ear that he forgets promptly as soon as it’s over. But Paul keeps his legs hooked tight around Primo’s waist afterwards, saying, “Please don’t stop, I don’t want this to stop”, and Primo can’t tell if he’s talking about the sex, or simply all of it.

“You were wrong, you know.” Paul is lying in bed, facing away. A thin plume of smoke rising above his naked shoulder tells Primo he has lit another cigarette. “What you said earlier. I’m not lonely. Not at all.”

Primo stubs his own cigarette out in the lumpy handmade bowl they’ve been using for an ashtray. Something Paul’s son probably made, he assumes, but he’s too tired to bother trying to unpack the strangeness of that. No stranger than lying here with Paul, in his American apartment crowded with the cast-offs of people who, for now, do not want him in their lives. It’s cold in here, winter seeping through the rattling vents, and in that sense it reminds Primo of the last bed they lay down in together, and how they had often woken up curled around one another on those chilled mountain mornings. Proof that their bodies had reached for each other unreservedly sometime in the night. After a moment, Primo puts an arm around Paul’s shoulders, and the two of them seem unsure what to do with this, lying stiffly until at last Paul begins to untense as he drifts off to sleep. 

Primo leans over and plucks the cigarette from his hand, putting it to his own lips before grinding it out, and he thinks, _You’re the loneliest person I know_.


	11. New York (Central Park)

Paul wakes up thinking he must have dreamt all of it. It wouldn’t be the first time that he’s worked himself into a frenzy at a party only to discover the next day that the person in bed next to him isn’t the one he’d meant to have sex with. Sometimes he can’t even find it in himself to be fully disappointed - at least the cocktails and the drugs maintain the illusion as it happens, turning someone else’s black hair into Primo’s dark brown, their drunken grunts into whatever Paul wants to hear, and isn’t that the best he can ask for? 

It has all the markings of a dream, and yet. He knows the weight of Primo’s arm over his side about as well as he knows this shapeless mattress and the sequined cushion under his cheek. Paul is too tired to unpack much of it at present, but the night does surface in his memory, Primo not being dead and late night wanders through Manhattan and Primo seeing the inside of his flat (the trash he’s been meaning to empty for weeks, Balthazar’s toys strewn across the living-room, that old blanket Paul stole from the set of a western because it smells like a barn and it reminded him of Calabria). The familiar aches of a rough night, sex without much patience or preparation, Primo’s voice in his ear, always the same ear, the one Paul had told Francesco to cut off, promises and threats, about how he’d take Paul away from here, back where they started, fucking in a barn like the animals they were, and then maybe Primo would marry him, give Paul the kind of wedding he deserved, although wasn’t that what they’d had in Rome, every night a wedding night, Primo shooting the neck off a champagne bottle, Paul drinking naked on the balcony, doing lines off each other’s stomachs and thighs, whatever Paul preferred he could have it, the palace or the barn, whatever he preferred as long as Primo could have him.

Paul reaches down for Primo’s hand, kisses it, and goes back to sleep.

_“Coffee?”_ Primo mutters, and so Paul drags himself out of bed and to the kitchen. 

As he waits for the coffee to brew, sitting on the counter with a cigarette, he looks over the chaos of his flat once again, which seems even more of an eyesore in the morning light. Garbage bag in hand, he begins a slow round of the premises, upending the ashtrays and the makeshift ashtrays, picking up balled up sketches and discarded pages of that script Martine had convinced him to try to write, two weeks spent working together before they’d jointly begged off, citing creative differences. In the little room he uses as a studio, the floor covered with old newspapers, light filtering in through the grid of the fire escape, he empties jars of water mixed with paint and picks up the canvas he’d flung to the floor the day before, another forest, another stone house, no more satisfying than the previous ones. Calabria wasn’t meant to be painted in an expressionistic style. It seems to demand the realism of the painters of old, those who knew how to paint the dust in the air, the way it infused the light, the faded tones of a peasant’s blouse and the mud on the soles of his feet, the grandeur and familiarity of an old forest, not the immediate feelings it inspired in a boy who paints like he lives his life, with reckless adoration.

 _“What’s this?”_ Primo asks.

“I was just… It’s not any good.” 

Paul flips the canvas around, placing it against the wall. Primo holds out his hand and Paul gives him his cigarette, debating whether it’s worth voicing the new mad idea that’s just sprung to his mind.

“Could you sit there?” he asks, pointing at the window sill. “I’ll get you the coffee, just… Just sit there.”

Primo raises his eyebrows but obeys him, and minutes later he’s sitting by the window with his cup of coffee and a fresh supply of cigarettes as Paul busies himself looking through his used canvases for one he might paint over. (Maybe if he hadn’t impulsively _thrown away_ his last few paintings…)

 _“I’m not a patient man,”_ Primo warns him, as if it needed saying.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m on it,” Paul mumbles, placing a hasty portrait on the easel (Mark’s last visit to New York - they’d spent the day running around Central Park with Balthazar, and Paul had done the portrait in the evening, thoroughly drunk, which might explain why his brother looks distinctly cross-eyed). He dips the brush into a can of white paint and begins to cover Mark’s face with broad strokes.

Primo’s eyes stray from his hands to his arse.

 _“Are you going to put on some clothes?”_ he asks.

“You said I had to be quick,” Paul reminds him. “So just, stop moving, yeah?”

(In the end Primo is surprisingly patient about it, maybe because he’d known from the beginning how it would end, with Paul flat on his back and Primo’s head between his legs, the both of them covered in paint. 

Primo’s never really cared about art, only the desecration of it, and the portrait on Paul’s easel, of a slender, blue-eyed shadow, a man in dark clothes on a dark window sill - it won’t mean much to him, but Paul tells himself he’ll have this, at least, to replace that polaroid picture he never took. Primo’s portrait on the canvas and the outline of their bodies on paint-splattered newspaper.)

“ _I have to go to Brooklyn,_ ” Primo says.

“Oh.” Paul is sitting on the counter again, letting his hair dry from the shower they took to wash off the paint – an awkward negotiation of limbs in too cramped a space, and Primo had run out of patience with that too, especially when the hot water shut off and he snapped about how nothing works the way it’s supposed to in this city. But now, as he leans forward, placing his hands either side of Paul’s hips, he smells like the soap Paul uses, faintly of oranges, and after nine long months of believing him buried six feet under Calabrian dirt, that is worth a little cold water.

“ _Can I come?”_ Paul asks. “There’s a boutique in Williamsburg that –”

“It is business.”

“Right. Isn’t it always.”

“ _Don’t ruin it_.”

Paul laughs, “Ruin what, this?” He dips forward and kisses him quickly, and Primo cuffs him lightly on the arm.

“ _Behave yourself. I have to go_.”

“Yeah, you said. Well, can I at least see you after? It’s not going to take all day, right? _I could meet you for lunch?_ ”

Primo rolls his eyes, pushes his hair back out of his face wearily, and Paul kisses him a second time, although not so fast, lingering for a moment with his teeth on Primo’s bottom lip, and when he asks again, he gets a muttered, “ _Yes, yes, it’s always what you want, isn’t it?_ ”

They reconvene in the early afternoon, although Paul is feeling too excitable to sit down to lunch, and the only times he’s seen Primo eat have always suggested the man feeds himself purely as a practicality, to keep his body ticking over. Paul buys them both a coffee – the quality of which Primo complains about to no end: _You Americans over-complicate everything: too much sugar, too much milk, like something a child would drink…_ – and they head into Central Park.

Primo won’t say much about it, only that he will be busy tonight. Some kind of meeting, important contacts, as far as Paul can make out, and even that he has to pry from him with the kind of tactics he used to employ to get cigarettes.

They wander over Bow Bridge, Paul trailing his hand along the cool stone balustrade as something to distract himself. The autumn colours are loud here amongst the trees that hem the edge of the water, the lake itself the same shade and texture as beaten metal. A chill breeze tugs at Paul’s hair and scarf, and Primo turns up the collar of his wool coat. It seems so strange to Paul that he had once imagined taking a photograph of him right here. What kind of life had he been picturing for them then? The kind that only exists in photographs, probably. The kind where what’s in the background doesn’t matter, where you cannot see beyond the edges.

“Whatever happens tonight, will you promise to call me?” he asks. “ _Call me, yeah?_ ”

“ _No. I can’t promise that_.”

“Please? You owe me that, at least. _After what you did_.”

Primo raises his eyebrows. “ _Well, that could mean anything_.”

“Come on, man, you know exactly what I mean. Just…promise you’ll try, okay? Just so I know you’re not dead in an alley somewhere.”

There are two men behind them, grim-faced and darkly dressed. They have been there, several yards back, since Paul bought the coffee, and now he glances over his shoulder again and asks, “ _Who are they?_ ”

“Calabresi.” Primo snorts. “ _For what it’s worth_.”

Paul squints at them, wondering if perhaps he’d recognise them up close. If they’re associates of Primo from Calabria, there’s a fair chance one or both of them might have brought him food once while he languished in the old train-tunnel. Just the thought makes his skin prickle, and he clutches at Primo’s sleeve before he can stop himself.

“ _What is it?_ ”

Paul shakes his head. They’ve stopped more or less in the middle of the bridge. The city sounds are muted here, replaced by the rattling leaves, the quiet splash of oars as a little boat rows slowly underneath them.

Primo unhooks Paul’s fingers from his sleeve and then smooths down the lapels of Paul’s jacket. “ _You have nothing to fear from them, not when you’re with me_.”

“Am I?” Paul asks. “With you, I mean? _Are we…?_ ”

Primo clicks his tongue at him and takes a sip of his coffee, grimacing as he resumes his pace across the bridge. Then he stops, turns back, and cocks his head as though to tell him _Come along_. When Paul catches up to him, Primo looks away over the water and says, “ _Do you really need to keep asking?_ ”

Paul feels like he has been here before. Waiting – in that hunting cabin in the mountains, after Francesco told him Primo had been shot, but also in the tunnel, in the cave, waiting for the familiar sound of Primo’s confident step: this man who held his life in his hands, come to tell him his fate.

He has never been much good at waiting, and by the time the phone rings, he has gotten himself quite drunk. It takes him a good thirty seconds to find the receiver in the first place, having buried it under cushions and cardigans, not unlike his mother used to do. Then he flings himself down on the sofa, twirling the phone cord around his fingers, and slurs, “Pronto?”

“Paol.”

“Well it’s about time, man, I was starting to think –"

“ _It’s trouble_.”

The meeting had gone south. That’s the bottom line. Now the car smells like iron, Gino bleeding out on the backseat, Renzo pressing on the hole in his brother’s gut, while Giuseppe barks _Drive! Drive!_ and Primo steps on the gas. He’s driven out of worse, back home. _Even the devil couldn’t catch Primo_ , Leonardo used to say. But the crowded streets of New York City are a long way from the open roads of Calabria, and he loses track of how many wing mirrors he clips. He narrowly avoids a collision with a roadsweeper, and at one point a man on a bicycle up ahead hears the screech of tires and abandons his bike in the middle of the street. Primo drives right over it.

“ _Did we lose them?_ ” he mutters, glancing in the rearview. Gino gives a howl as the car takes another hard turn, and Renzo nods miserably, which Primo decides to take as a yes.

They bundle Gino up to the apartment, Renzo and Giuseppe carrying him while Primo strides on ahead to knock heavily on the door. Carlotta appears, cigarette in hand, her hair in rollers. “ _What’s the matter? What’s happened?_ ”

In the next room, one of her children begins to cry, probably woken by the noise, and Giuseppe shoulders her out of the way, saying, “ _Can’t you shut him up?_ ”

The apartment seems to stink worse than usual, as though the evening’s rain has brought all the smells to the surface, from the clogged drain to the sodden wool of their coats, as they crowd into the kitchen and dump Gino’s unconscious body on the table.

“ _I should never have listened to you_.” Giuseppe shakes his head firmly as he slices through Gino’s shirt with the kitchen scissors. “ _Those boys out of East Harlem aren’t like the Families, they’ve got their own code, and they don’t give a damn about where you’re… Ah, shit, look at this mess._ ”

Gino’s bullet wound is still leaking blood, even as they try to stem it with dishcloths and the torn remnants of his shirt. The longer Primo looks, he can taste it in the back of his mouth, and it’s almost pleasing, the way it reminds him of home like nothing else here has so far. Not a good place to die, he thinks, although whether he means New York or Calabria, he isn’t entirely sure.

Carlotta reappears in the kitchen doorway, this time with her youngest son blinking sleepily on her hip. There’s something about her, then, with the boy in her arms and the curlers in her hair, that strikes Primo as familiar. He never saw his mother holding a baby – he was the only child she’d ever had – but even so, he jerks his head towards the hallway, eyes on the boy as he says, “ _Go to your room. This isn’t for him_.” It will be one day, of course. That’s the nature of this life. But there’s a good many things Primo might have traded for one more day of simply being his mother’s son.

It’s a messy process, but not a long one. Gino dies, which Primo could have told them was going to happen from the start. Renzo still seems surprised, standing uselessly beside the body with his hands red and sticky, still pressing on the hole in Gino’s stomach, like he might somehow be able to save him.

Primo groans and rakes his hair back from his head, and then brings his fist down on the cold stovetop, clattering a dirty saucepan in the process. Regina will be furious about the loss of one of her nephews, which means Leonardo will have to be furious too. But more than that: there is a chance, Primo realises, privately, that he might have fucked things.

The whole purpose of this visit was to get a feel for the scene in New York, make a few contacts, sure up some old family ties, decide if this was the ideal stage for their grand production. (That _was_ the whole purpose; anything that has come up since – waking in the embrace of a golden boy who painted his picture because _I’ve been thinking about it for years, man, but I don’t think I would have been able to do it right until just now_ – is pure coincidence.) But the Italians out of Harlem supply almost the entire district’s cocaine. They would have been valuable customers if Primo could have brokered a deal; it was too good an opportunity to miss. Except they were just kids, really. Kids with guns and cunning, and Primo has to respect that, even now – reminds him too much of himself not to – but none of them had even set foot in Italy. They spoke with American accents and dressed like caricatures of themselves, and they couldn’t have cared less about Primo. In their eyes, he could see it, he was already too old, and Calabria was just a word they’d heard, they had no sense of the place. This had made him angry, which has always only served to make him reckless.

 _Disrespectful_ is the word Giuseppe uses now.

Those Harlem boys will cut your ears and nose off, he says. “ _I told you, they’re their own outfit, they don’t have to answer to anyone. They’ll come round here and carve my wife and children up and that’ll be on you_.”

“ _Watch who you’re talking to, little man_.”

Giuseppe scoffs. “ _You may be a don in Calabria, but you haven’t got a pot to piss in here, goat farmer. You’ve got nothing, and now you've made sure that we'll never have anything either_.”

The baby starts bawling again, and Primo goes to skulk on the fire escape stairs, kicking at the railings, and taking a pinch of coke that he’s too worked up to really appreciate. Then he motions for Renzo to join him and says, “ _I need you to sort out a flight home. Reggio, Rome, fucking Milan, just get it done, we’re leaving_.”

Renzo stares blankly, his face grey.

“ _What, did they shoot your brains out as well as Gino’s guts? I said go_.”

Primo remains out on the fire escape, smoking cigarette after cigarette, even as the rain starts up again. Without Renzo, it’s just Gino’s lifeless body inside, and he honestly can’t tell which is worse company, that or Giuseppe and Carlotta’s miserably domesticity. (He’d argued with Paul, hadn’t he, many times, but Paul was always the focus of those disputes, never just something to be dismissed, the way husbands dismiss their wives.)

 _You’ve got nothing_ , his cousin had said. Primo scoffs.

When Renzo returns, soaked and shivering, he heads out into the rain himself. Giuseppe doesn’t have a phone, but even if he did, Primo wouldn’t use it, not for this call.

It takes Paul a while to pick up, and when he does there’s a definite slur to his words. “Well it’s about time, man, I was starting to think –”

“ _It’s trouble_ ,” Primo says. “ _I’m flying back to Rome tonight_.”

“Oh.”

He can hear Paul’s breathing down the line, so certainly alive but unreachable. The condensation on the windows of the phone booth blurs the edges of the world beyond, but in his mind he is back in Paul’s ridiculous apartment, in that bed, Paul’s hips between his thighs, his wild boy murmuring _Jesus it’s always been you_ with his head thrown back against the pillow. They are something else here, as though the chaos of this city fits itself around them, makes them work, even if Primo himself doesn’t fit here at all. Giuseppe was right about that. But that kind of space doesn’t exist for them in Calabria – no matter how much time passes, it always comes back to the same thing, the same decision he made when he kicked the boy out of his car in the snow all those years ago: he can have his empire or he can have Paul Getty, but he can’t have both.

He knows what he ought to say now.

And yet, in his mind, there’s Paul catching up to him on the bridge in the park, neither of them really looking at one another, but Paul touching his fingers lightly to the back of Primo’s knuckles as they walked. Those knuckles have been bruised and split open and scabbed, and Primo could count on them how many people have ever touched him without violence, but Paul is the only one who keeps coming back to do it again.

They go on not saying anything until the line begins to beep to signify they only have seconds left, and at last Primo says, “JFK Airport. _One hour_.”

“Wait, I can’t just––“

And then there’s only the reflections of light on the wet concrete, the faint smell of blood on his hands, the dark silence of the disconnected call.

Paul arrives at the airport an hour and forty minutes after Primo’s phone call, falling out of the taxi and running to the terminal at the end of a ride spent biting his lip and shredding the lining of his coat, his foot bouncing against the front seat. The taxi driver didn’t care whether Paul made it on time or not, traffic is traffic and besides, with all the crazy things the man sees on a daily basis, a young man without any shoes, drenched to the bone from waiting five minutes at the curb in a downpour; it’s nothing worth caring about or remembering.

The plane for Rome left ten minutes ago and for a long time Paul just stands under the screen listing incoming departures, his bag open at his feet, full of maybe one change of clothes and an assortment of Martine’s underwear and jeans and one of his son’s scarves. Turning around does cross his mind, returning to huddle under that scratchy woollen blanket as the rain keeps pouring outside, waiting for the next day when all of this becomes something he has to get over, rather than a source of pure, unadulterated distress. But there’s a plane to London three hours from now, and Paul figures, it’s worth a shot. He can move on to Italy if he decides to do so, or he can visit people there (he doesn’t think: his father). 

The ticket costs him an arm and a leg, money that should have gone towards paying his next rent, but he forgets about it when he gets to the cramped waiting section outside the gate and finds Primo there, lying back on one of the plastic seats with his feet on his bag, sunglasses on against the sickly glare of the ceiling lights.

Paul doesn’t say anything. Dropping his bag and taking the chair next to Primo’s, he tries to arrange his tall frame in a way that’ll be at least vaguely comfortable, arms crossed, his head on Primo’s shoulder. He doesn’t want to invite Primo’s anger over the missed flight, and aside from that, words seem somewhat superfluous. Isn’t their presence revealing enough, the both of them stranded here because Paul couldn’t bear to go back and Primo couldn’t bear to go on?

“Londra, eh?” Primo says, a while later. 

Paul shrugs against his side.

“I’m sorry, man. About your business thing. That it didn’t turn out how you wanted.”

Primo scoffs.

A half hour maybe before they’re due to embark, he pulls Paul into a bathroom stall and fucks him against a wall, the sort of selfish sex that reminds Paul of the early days at the Calati house, Primo intent on getting off regardless of whether Paul does or not, and he couldn’t say if Primo’s trying to get over whatever went wrong at his meeting or to prove to himself that Paul was worth the extra hours spent in New York. Either way it must have worked, because Primo strokes Paul’s hair afterwards, pulls up his trousers for him and fastens them, his hands lingering on Paul’s hips. When Paul kisses him he doesn’t move away but leans into it, whispering a curse against Paul’s mouth, his voice oddly tender.

On the plane Paul sweet-talks Primo’s neighbour into swapping seats with him and smiles at the flight attendant until it gets them free drinks. He falls asleep with his mouth open and his hand between Primo’s thighs, waking up hours later to find out that Primo has put his coat over his lap rather than pushing Paul’s hand away.


	12. Jet lag

It’s mid-morning in London when they arrive. Paul is used to jet lag, no worse than a hangover really, but Primo needs several cups of coffee and a pinch of coke in the airport bathroom just to stand up straight. This only serves to make him tetchy, sparking like some broken neon sign, and Paul follows, suitably moth-like, trotting after him through Heathrow arrivals wearing mismatched shoes he managed to pull out of his bag when the flight attendant refused to let him on the plane with bare feet.

“ _So what’s your big plan, eh?_ ”

“The next flight to Rome isn’t until this evening. I was thinking maybe – Hey man slow down will you? I was thinking maybe we could go see some stuff. You know, just to pass the time? You’ve never been to London before.”

“ _And I’ll never come here again. The sooner I’m back in Italy, the better_.”

“Hey…hey,” Paul catches up to him, putting a hand on his arm, and Primo turns abruptly.

“ _What?_ ” he snaps. _“I don’t want to go look at your galleries, Paol_.”

“Okay.” Paul takes a deep breath. “Okay, man, let’s just go find a hotel or something. _A hotel, alright?_ ”

It reminds Paul of a night, years ago now, deep in the Calabrian countryside, when Primo had come back drunk and irritable – exhausted, Paul would later learn, from a five hour drive from Rome – and he’d staggered into the barn and pushed Paul up against the filthy wall and kissed him like he wanted to knock his teeth out. Paul had always hated it in that barn, hated the stale smell of it, the way the grit of the place got into the seams of his clothes and under his nails as he clawed at the walls while Primo dragged some kind of ecstasy out of him. That was the night he decided he wanted to go upstairs – that if this wild man was going to have him, he could at least have him in a bed.

He’d put his hand over Primo’s, so tentatively it was trembling, and he could hear his own shallow breathing in the space between them, only letting up long enough to say,

“You must be so tired.”

Primo had given him that wide-eyed, slightly manic stare, as though Paul had just sprung some devastating news on him, and Paul bit his lip and swallowed and tried again.

“ _Are you tired?_ We could, uh…sdraiarsi, no?” His Italian wasn’t half so good in those days. He fumbled through what he wanted to say ( _Take me upstairs? You can have me however you want, just take me out of here_ ), Primo regarding him with a sort of lazy amusement by this point, and then for good measure, Paul had leaned in to kiss him. Primo had brought his hand up sharply then, and for a moment Paul thought he meant to hit him, and flinched, which made Primo scoff. He had only wanted to grab a handful of Paul’s hair.

Primo _had_ taken him upstairs after that, perhaps as some sort of joke. It really was a squalid little room, but Primo fucked him on his back, Paul’s legs around his waist, and there was no going back to the barn after that.

Now, in the airport, Paul bites his lip the same way he had back then, and he can’t see Primo’s eyes because the man insisted on wearing sunglasses, even in the middle of the day, to hide his weariness from a city full of strangers, but he hears him mutter something under his breath, and at last Primo says, “ _Sure, sure. Whatever you want_.”

As often they are living on borrowed time, Primo knows it, whose entire life has been a mad rush to compensate for what he knows will most likely be an early death. He’s never been one to draw anything out, always seeking fast pleasures; never knew how to savour anything, never learned to do so.

Yet the aftershock of New York is lingering like a dirty film upon his skin, and London is hardly any better, grey and drab like neither the buildings nor the people have ever seen the sun. He didn’t sleep on the plane and is now facing a brand new day with little but drugs and frustration in his system, and this tedious fatigue is making him feel ancient, like perhaps he might have turned into his uncle earlier than planned, an angry shell of a man unable to keep up with the times.

“Primo,” Paul says, his voice gentle, almost a question, maybe because he expects him to lash out again, like he did in the street leading to the hotel, cursing viciously against the rain as he huddled inside his coat. “You shouldn’t go to sleep man, it’s gonna mess you up for days, jet lag, you know?”

Primo doesn’t know, not really, but he doesn’t protest when Paul offers to help him stay awake, just raises his eyebrows at him, _I’d like to see you try,_ and sinks back against the pillow, hands in Paul’s damp hair, thinking of nothing beyond this clean little room and Paul’s mouth and hands. Before it’s over he pulls on the boy’s hair, _“Here, come here,”_ pushes him down against those second-rate bed sheets and fucks him slowly, feeling like he’s falling, forehead pressed against Paul’s nape, never letting go of his hair even as he grips his hip (Paul’s hand over his, _“I’d missed this”_ ).

He does fall asleep afterwards. Maybe Paul tried to wake him up and failed, maybe he didn’t dare. He only rouses him hours later, in time to fumble their way back from the industrial surroundings of the airport to their appointed terminal, and Primo thinks it’s fitting that if he ever thinks of London again it’ll conjure up not some red and blue British postcard but the smell of the rain on Paul’s skin, Paul’s body shoring him up, the tranquil rhythm of Paul’s voice lulling him to sleep as Paul strung up English words that Primo didn’t try to understand.

( _I’ve thought about it, and I want to know. Your_ affari, _I want to know about it. Otherwise we’re just lying to each other, right? You don’t have to tell me everything. But you could trust me with some of it. Do you? Trust me? Primo? Hey, Primo?_ )

It may be mid-November, but the weather when they touch down in Rome feels worlds away from London or New York. It isn’t especially warmer, but the sky is bright and cloudless, the air crisp, even as they step out of the airport, and Paul tilts his head up to feel the evening sun on his face. It is a homecoming, really, isn’t it? Italy was his home for most of his life, after all.

Primo seems to be of the same mind, at least to the extent that the man has a concept of home. He has shed his heavy American coat – stuffed it into his suitcase without ceremony in exchange for his old leather jacket – and he looks more like himself again, all sharp angles and the clear outline of those arms that have held Paul and restrained him in equal measure. Paul offers him a cigarette while they wait for a taxi to take them into the city, and Primo accepts with a sly sort of grin that usually means he’s planning something.

He’d left his car in the city ahead of travelling to New York. Now they find it with a slew of parking tickets stuffed under the wiper blades, which Primo simply tosses away. There’s an excitement to getting into this car again, Paul finds; there’s enough of his blood, sweat and tears in here that he and the Alfetta must share enough DNA to be distantly related. He’s in the mood to put his feet up on the dashboard but he doesn’t dare. Instead he settles for rolling down the window and dangling his hand out, letting the cool air raise the hairs on his arm. Primo turns on the radio, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel in time to the drumbeat from whatever American rock song is playing, hitting the gas with a kind of mad energy that makes Paul feel awake for the first time in hours, and the car howls as they leave the city founded by wolves far behind them.

Paul doesn’t need to ask where they’re going, nor does he try and persuade Primo otherwise. It’s what he wanted, isn’t it? Speaking softly to him in that hotel outside Heathrow, he’d as good as circled Calabria on the map. He’d meant the things he said, he really had. All he knows about Primo’s business is that the man distributes cocaine, that he has made a lot of money for himself in doing so, and that sometimes people shoot at him. Somewhere under all of that is the $5 million Paul’s grandfather deemed his life to be worth. None of these are things that should make you want to go into business with someone, except that isn’t exactly what Paul’s asking. The only capital he has to invest is the colour of his hair and the touch of his mouth. But in all those months he had believed Primo dead, the thought he kept coming back to was _If I’d been there, I could have changed it._ He’d promised himself that he would do things differently if by some miracle he ever got the chance. The language his grandfather would have used would probably be ‘high risk, high reward investment’.

Actually, the language his grandfather would have used would be ‘idiot young man’.

Paul does offer to drive, but it’s not until sometime after they’ve passed Napoli that Primo is prepared to accept the jet lag might be getting the better of him. Still, he seems much more at ease here than he had on the other side of the Atlantic, as he leans against the trunk of the car for a cigarette before he and Paul switch places.

“Are we going back to the mountains?” Paul asks, rummaging in his suitcase for a cardigan it seems he didn’t actually pack. He’s not sure he particularly wants that. That cabin in the hills was its own thing for its own time, and he doesn’t like the idea of simply being installed somewhere again. He isn’t a painting, no matter how many times Primo has compared him to one.

But Primo just looks down at his suitcase and blows smoke at him. “ _Why did you pack so much women’s underwear?_ ”

It’s gone midnight by the time they reach the village. (Primo had put up with Paul’s driving for a full hour before he demanded he pull over and they switch back, saying at this rate they wouldn’t get to Calabria before the new year, and that’s if Paul didn’t drive them into a ditch first.) There aren’t many lights on and Paul can only make out the vague silhouettes of houses as the car steals through the empty streets. He’s grateful that Primo had insisted on driving, because he doubts he would be able to navigate these narrow roads that seem so badly to want to trick you into taking a wrong turn. Paul can feel his eyes closing, his head nodding to one side with exhaustion, but at last the car comes to a stop.

They are near the top of the village, and the few lights below them seem very small and far away from up here. The wind has more force too, with very little to stand in its way. Paul wraps his arms around himself against the chill. As his eyes adjust, he can see that they have parked outside a building, tall and with a certain foreboding elegance, although the crumbling masonry and boarded up windows suggest it has taken a few beatings over the years. Like anything here, he supposes.

He blinks sleepily, squinting at Primo in the dark. “ _Where are we?_ ”

Primo shrugs as he gives the door a shove with the heel of his boot. “ _My house_.”


	13. Primo's house

There are rules to his presence here, Primo tells him that night. He chooses his moment to do so, waiting until they’re in bed and Paul is drowsy from the long drive south and the inconclusive sex that followed, hands on each other until exhaustion caught up with them and Paul let his head drop against Primo’s shoulder, “Finisci, per favore”, after which Primo’s hands had covered his own and guided them, and Paul hadn’t disliked it, this feeling of being taken over. 

_“Don’t go down to the village”,_ Primo tells him. _“Don’t talk to anyone.”_

Paul laughs, the sound muted against Primo’s shoulder.

“Man, no one’s ever had any luck at keeping me anywhere.”

 _Except you,_ he thinks. _With a gun in your hand and then with your hands alone, or just the promise of them._

They would have slept through the morning if Leonardo hadn’t driven up to the house moments after the sunrise, letting himself in and walking straight to Primo’s bedroom with the familiarity of one who’s become used to rousing their boss when he returns from a bender.

When he sees them in bed together he checks his step, and for several long seconds nobody speaks - not Leonardo who’s aged a decade in the blink of an eye, not Primo who’d become alert the moment the car pulled into the courtyard, or Paul, who hasn’t dared move from where he’d draped himself over Primo’s back, and who now looks warily between them, trying to gauge if an intervention on his part would make things considerably worse.

 _“So I take it he knows you’re not dead then?”_ Leonardo snaps. This after Primo has extricated himself from the bed and put on a pair of trousers, stalking to the door with a cigarette ready in one hand and a flick of his wrist to steer Leonardo out onto the landing. Leonardo had looked back in time to see Paul staring after them, chewing his lip sheepishly.

“ _Jesus Christ, Primo_.” 

That’s all the words he can find this early in the morning, but it is staggering, the things Primo can get away with, the things that poor, stupid boy will let him get away with. And he is stupid, Paul, no matter how fond of him Leonardo might be. Anyone with more sense, in his position, would have shot Primo in the head while he slept.

“ _Send him back. Rome or New York, it doesn’t matter, just get him out of here_.”

Primo takes a slow drag on his cigarette and then says, “ _No_.”

“ _No? We’re finished if this gets out, please tell me you understand that_.”

Primo shrugs in the way Leonardo has come to recognise over the years means he knows he’s done something he probably shouldn’t have, but his reply is still the same, and Leonardo throws his hands up.

Primo has never been able to think straight when it comes to Paul, not even back then. The boy would just have to look at him a certain way and Primo would be ranting about burying him, throttling him, tying him down. Frantic about his investment, Leonardo used to think, but now he wonders if Primo just wanted to use their names in the same sentence, or some excuse to put his hands on Paul that wouldn’t raise any eyebrows.

Leonardo knows Primo isn’t naive enough to think things have changed just because he’s in charge now. If anything he has even more eyes on him, and he holds all their lives in the balance.

“ _You can’t honestly expect to…_ keep _him here_.”

But Primo grins at him then, cigarette between his teeth, and Leonardo realises too late the mistake he’s made. A surefire way to get Primo to do anything is to start a sentence with _You can’t_.

Primo’s house is large and mostly empty, some rooms only furnished with dust balls and dead bugs lined up under the window sills. The only rooms Primo has bothered to inhabit are the kitchen and the nearby living room, and the bedroom on the first floor where they slept, in a bed with a headboard and feet of sculpted oak that could have belonged to the previous owners, could have belonged to Primo’s family; probably not both since it’s unlikely Primo’s family ever had the means to own this kind of house, the upkeep of which would require servants. Primo’s uncle owned a farm and this house didn’t belong to a farmer.

Paul spends that first day wandering the house and the garden behind it, looking down at the village, his eyes following the sinuous path of a car going downhill, of a goat herd clambering uphill, the jingle of bells carrying upwards to the empty room where he’s taken residence, arms crossed over the window sill, waiting for Primo to come home.

 _“When I come back, we’ll talk,”_ Primo had said before he left, striding back into the room to kiss Paul where he sat in the bed, making a demonstration of it - maybe because Leonardo was waiting for him on the doorstep. Paul saw his lips compress into an angry line.

Maybe Primo meant he’d tell Paul about his business. Maybe it’s just going to be more of the same, don’t go out, don’t let people know you’re here, although the people in the village must know by now, since Paul has opened quite a few apertures that used to be closed and he’s been waiting framed inside one of them like some forlorn princess in a fairy tale.

Maybe when Primo comes home Paul will tell him this isn’t going to work.

Maybe he’ll open his mouth and Primo will kiss him and it’ll be like the little stone house, Primo channelling all the madness of whatever crimes he’s committed during the day into furious sex, or forgetting whatever anger spurred him to drive here at an unreasonable speed the moment he steps in, taking Paul to bed as if they’d never known anything but the slowness of life in the mountains.

Maybe Paul will be gone by the time Primo returns - eventually, maybe, but not today, when it feels like he’s sitting above the world, and all he’d need to do is reach out, godlike, to arrange it to his liking, dispersing Primo’s enemies with a pinch, turning Primo’s car around and setting it on course for the house, cutting off the road that leads to the village so they’ll be trapped here in some momentary cycle of sleeping and fucking. And would that be so bad, really? Hasn’t this been his world for the past four years, the rest of his life spent in frazzled expectation for the cycle to begin anew?

Primo returns later than he would have liked, kept on edge all day by the thought of Paul wandering off into the village or over the cliffs out of boredom. No one who saw him wouldn’t recognise him, that wild red hair like a beacon. But when he arrives home, he finds Paul drinking from a dusty wine bottle that Primo didn’t even know he’d owned, singing badly in Italian, scraping the burnt remains of something out of a frying pan.

“Yeah, I can’t cook,” he says, snapping his fingers in time to a rhythm that seems to be playing only in his head.

“ _What are you doing?_ ”

“Waiting up for you. _You said we’d talk_.”

Primo frowns. He hadn’t really expected Paul to remember that; he had seemed half asleep when Primo said it. He is tired himself – it’s been a long day, with Leonardo scowling at him all the while – so now as he reaches for the bottle of wine, he hooks a hand around Paul’s neck and pulls him in to kiss him, knowing that will keep the boy busy for now.

They stagger through empty rooms in between hungry open-mouthed kisses and pulling one another’s hair, half undressed as Primo backs him up against the wall. “You’re not going to distract me,” Paul keeps saying, but always delighted, laughing as if he’s high, mouth like a peach, like he was made to be kissed, and so Primo does, over and over, against the wall, on the sofa in the living room, upstairs buried amongst the bedsheets, leaving Paul breathless and squinting happily in the light of the old chandelier overhead.

One lunchtime while he’s down in the village, Primo sends Francesco out to buy paint and a sketchbook (“ _The expensive kind_ ,” he says irritably, when Francesco asks him what kind of paint he means), because Paul, it seems, had forgotten to pack his usual supply of heavy paper and cracked pastels in his rush to make it to the airport on time, and Primo figures it’ll be a good start in keeping the boy occupied. Indeed, Paul doesn’t seem to have packed much of use at all, mostly just socks that don’t match, that same scratchy jumper he wore back in January, and several pairs of his wife’s underwear. (Although these he does wear, one evening sitting in Primo’s lap, and then around his ankles while Primo bends him over the back of the sofa.)

But Paul barely glances at the paints, just slouches against the door frame and says, “I meant it, I want to know, man. _Your business_.”

“ _Why are you so interested, eh?_ ”

“Well,” Paul answers, somewhat soberly, and Primo expects more of the same sentiments he’s been hearing since that wide-eyed boy first rolled over and begged a cigarette in the Calati house, whispering, _$17 million would go a long way in Morocco, man_ , but instead Paul says, “It was my family’s money, after all. That’s what built your business, right? I’m just, uh, _looking after our foreign investments_.”

Primo barks a laugh as he lights up a cigarette. “ _You don’t know the first thing about business_.”

“No.” But Paul smiles slyly at him as he leans over to swipe the cigarette for himself. “But I know how rich men work, better than you ever will. That’s gotta be worth something, right?”

So Primo does tell him. Not all of it - far from it, bits and pieces, and he speaks fast and in Italian and doesn’t wait to see if Paul understands everything, since it’s better if he doesn’t. He talks about the mess in New York, which the old men (as he calls his uncle’s cousins and associates) would like to blame on him, and he explains how tedious it has been to keep the ‘ndrina in check, how a lot of it isn’t about cocaine and bribing customs officials and negotiating construction contracts at gunpoint, but rather about showing up at a baptism, and making sure that a cousin’s cousin will accept to marry off his daughter in the interest of the village, and lending a hand for the killing of the sow at the house of one of the old men, close to Salvatore’s farm. The sow’s ear-splitting shriek had brought to mind a fight with his father, when Primo was fifteen and his father had drunk too much, eaten too much, and wasn’t half as alert as usual, and Primo had tried striking him back and had been so surprised to land a blow that he’d hovered a moment as the blood trickled down his father’s chin. Enough time for his father to trip him - knock his head against the ground - after which he’d dragged Primo by the collar to the bucket of blood under the dead sow. Maybe he’d held him under a long time, half-intent on drowning him; maybe it’d only been a few seconds. The horror of it had stuck to Primo’s skin for weeks, months, years after, dreams where warm blood filled his eyes and mouth and nose and he couldn’t scrub it away no matter how hard he tried.

 _“A useful lesson,”_ he says, as he pulls out a cigarette, promptly dropping it when Paul surges forward to kiss him, any part of his face that he can reach, his chin and cheek and ear, fleeting kisses on his eyelids, lingering kisses on Primo’s startled mouth, the taste of wine still on Paul’s tongue. 

_“Enough, enough!”_ Primo manages to say, holding Paul at bay with a hand twisted in his red curls. _“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”_

“I’m kissing you for all the times I couldn’t kiss you,” Paul explains, with that hazy smile that means he’s as drunk as he is sincere.

 _What makes you think I’d have wanted your kisses?_ Primo thinks, and he almost says it out loud - what is Paul thinking, that Primo would have welcomed an embrace as he emerged from that bucket, with the red imprint of his father’s shoe etched in his back through the thin shirt he wore, as he coughed up blood on the grass? Does Paul think he’s the only thing on Primo’s mind, when he attends those family meetings that are also, always, business meetings and dangerous gambles, shipments of cocaine at stake over who will be named godfather of a newborn son, what good are a boy’s kisses, beautiful as the boy may be, languorous as the kisses may be?

No good whatsoever, and yet Primo has never belonged here, he can kill people and strike drug deals and weapon deals for millions of dollars but he’s never had any instinct for these family matters that are the backbone of any Calabrian crime enterprise. He does get bored at such gatherings, he does think about Paul in whatever position he had him last or will have him next, or if he’s tired, he thinks of Paul’s stupid smile when he doesn’t realise he’s being watched. Mud on his feet, straw in his hair, the last person in the world Primo should be longing for or thinking about.

“You need to give her something,” Paul says.

Primo frowns at him.

“The girl,” Paul explains. “The girl you said has to marry some guy so the guy’s father will deliver some guns for you? Or maybe it was coke, whatever. You want to buy out her father, but I think you should talk to the girl. Or get someone to talk to her,” he adds, as if he suddenly has doubts about Primo’s powers of persuasion. “You should figure out what she wants. She can get her parents to agree to the wedding if it’s in her interest.”

“Things don’t work like this,” Primo tells him, with more patience than Paul deserves. _“Women don’t get a say.”_

“Women always have a say,” Paul counters, like he’s reciting a lesson somebody taught him. Maybe his mother. “Even if you don’t ask them for their opinion. Yeah, I think you should talk to the girl.”

Primo mutters something dismissive and Paul nods, “Yeah man, whatever,” but they both know the time when Primo didn’t care what Paul said or thought is long past.

“ _So then_ ,” Primo mutters, later, when they’re lying half undressed on the sofa, passing a cigarette between them. “ _What do women want? You’re the expert_.”

“I don’t know, man. Didn’t you ever read _The Canterbury Tales_?” A stupid question for many reasons, least of all because Paul himself has never read it, not properly anyway. But his father did have a battered copy at his flat in London, and sometimes on rainy afternoons when nobody had the patience to entertain him, Paul would leaf through it, admiring the strange woodcuts and trying to fit his mouth around the Old English spellings. And he does remember Chaucer’s answer to that particular question.

“Women want what anyone else wants, man. _Power, right?_ ”

Power over men. Power to steer their own course through life. Primo, he knows, can relate to that.

Paul would kiss him again, covering his face recklessly, if he thought Primo would allow it. The image of some teenage incarnation of him with blood in his mouth is still fresh in Paul’s mind, and he thinks now, if he’d ever had any real power of his own, he would go back to the train tunnel that last night in Calabria in ‘73, and when that fat old don who stank of sheep shit and vinegar joked that Primo’s father liked to try and _knock some sense into him_ , Paul would wrap his chain around the old man’s neck. Primo might have preferred that to kisses: violence over tenderness.

Paul has never given much thought as to whether Primo believes in God. He’s just taken it as a given, the same way he accepts that the Calabrian sky is always blue and cigarettes taste better when they’ve been between someone else’s lips first. It is holy to repeat a name three times. Paul wonders if Primo ever said his name aloud (not the awful, inescapable whole of it, just _Paol_ ) and hoped for him to appear. Probably not. Primo isn’t given over to fantasies of any kind, never has been.

But Paul is, even if deep down he has learnt that the good things in his life never seem to last very long. He clings to fantasy the same way he did with those stories he used to tell his brothers and sisters, his long fingers making silhouettes on the wall – because he has to believe things will be alright in the end.

So now he watches Primo asleep in the dark, the shadow of his hair fallen across his face, concealing some of the troubles there for the time being. His broad shoulders are pale in the moonlight, the veins poignant on the back of his hand, which lies flat across Paul’s chest. How many times has Paul watched him like this over the years? Even back in the Calati house he would make the most of those rare moments, when Primo was worn out and sated enough to close his eyes for a little while, and Paul, grateful for a respite from his wild mood swings, would look at him and see just a man, not anything more or less. What does it say, he thinks, that he is still here, still watching the rise and fall of Primo’s body, and playing out fantasies in his head: _What if things were different this time?_

The following night brings a beast of a storm. Rain hurls itself at the hillside as lightning tears through the sky, lighting up the village below in white and neon. Paul is leaning out of the window trying to catch the water on his tongue when Primo gets back with a whiskey bottle in one hand, and he grabs a fistful of Paul’s wet hair as he pulls him back inside.

“The rain tastes different up here, man,” Paul says, when Primo demands to know what he’s doing. “Like I can really taste the sky.”

“ _You want to taste something?_ ” He presses the whiskey bottle into Paul’s cold hands. “ _Drink up, we’re celebrating_.”

It’s true: a contract finally agreed with the Camorra, a trade deal negotiated with the Tunisians, a Christening he had not wanted to attend, now postponed because it turns out the mother was having an affair. There is money coming in, and Primo is never so wired as when that prospect is on the horizon.

“ _Bought some fucking furniture_ ,” he says.

“Yeah?”

They are nose to nose, perched on the windowsill, waiting to see who’ll lose their balance first. The bitter taste of coke and liquor on their gums is as familiar a reminder of a good time as a hand between the legs. Paul has opened all the shutters and the sound of rain pours in, the snarl of thunder making him wild the same way Primo gets wild about dollar bills, and the boy tosses his hair back and laughs whenever the lightning flashes.

“Expensive,” Primo explains, still pleased about his furniture.

“Hey man, isn’t everything?”

“ _Only the things worth having_.”

“Well, this rain didn’t cost a dime.”

Primo rolls his eyes, pours whiskey on his fingers, and puts them in Paul’s mouth.

The next day, Paul decides to paint the view of the town below, the mountains beyond fading into a hazy pale horizon, as if somehow, painting it, he can lay claim to this place that took so much from him, even with the things it gave. Primo has, unfathomably, bought him watercolours, as if he just chose the first thing he saw that resembled paint. Paul is not a watercolours sort of guy. He likes bold tones and wild brushstrokes, and his first few attempts at the landscape come out smudged and stained, houses bleeding into hills bleeding into the sky.

Primo returns earlier than usual, while there’s still enough light for Paul to paint by, but he sits himself down on the windowsill, blocking out the view. Paul swats at him with a hand spattered in washed out colours and says, “Seriously, man, I’m going to fuck up the church tower again.”

Primo kicks at the stool Paul’s perched on, sketchbook balanced precariously on his knees, and sends the brush skidding across the paper, some dark comet streaking over the mountains like a bad omen.

“Great, thanks. What do you look so pleased about?”

Primo does look pleased, the sort of satisfied smirk he wears when he thinks he’s about to get something due to him.

“ _How did it go with the girl?_ ” Paul asks.

“ _She wants her brother’s factory._ ”

“You actually spoke to her? What – are you going to give it to her?”

Primo bares his teeth as he grins.

“And she’s going to marry that guy? Shit, man.” Paul smiles cautiously. “Pretty good, no?”

Primo kisses him this time, knocking dirty paint water over the image of Calabria. Much later, Paul will find that picture again, with only a few curves of the hills and half a church tower to indicate what it was, and he will wonder if there wasn’t some meaning to it: the stain the pair of them left on that place. But for now he is just happy to be kissed, his dirty fingers in Primo’s hair, the consequences of his words ringing through the valley.

“You really spoke to her yourself?” He doesn’t think he’s ever really seen Primo hold a conversation with a woman.

But Primo shrugs, the pad of his thumb on Paul’s lip. “ _I just pretended to be you_. ‘Women always have a say’,” he mimics.

“I don’t sound like that.”

“ _Yes you do. And women like it_.”

The girl’s brother won’t be happy, apparently, although perhaps that is no surprise. It was either his unhappiness or Primo’s, and Paul knows enough about the latter to think it’s probably in Calabria’s best interests that things are playing out this way. He is impressed, and tries to tell Primo that in the way he kisses him, teeth on his lips, tongue in his mouth, hands sliding down the back of his trousers.

At the root of all this there has always been a certain amount of admiration. How could you not admire a man who walks like he’s wearing the devil’s own boots? They’d met at a time when both of them were struggling towards freedom, but only Primo had had the ruthlessness to reach out and take it. So Paul had admired him for that, as much as he’d feared him, as much as he’d sometimes thought that if he were to die, he’d like to be reincarnated as a rivet in the back pocket of Primo’s jeans.

He is too happy with himself, with the thought that the pair of them have achieved something together, that he doesn’t really think about what his advice might have set in motion. Not until he’s woken in the night by the sound of glass smashing somewhere below in the house, and the glint of metal in the moonlight as Primo draws the gun he keeps under his pillow.

Primo nods at him to get under the bed. When Paul refuses to do so, he nods again, with that same cold-eyed stare, raising the gun slightly. _What are you going to do, shoot me?_ Paul wants to say, but he does drop off the bed and crawl under it, feeling like he’s playing some twisted game of hide and seek. He doesn’t know if he feels too young for this, or too old. As he lies flat on his stomach in a good inch of dust, it also strikes him that should he die here, his mother will never understand what could have drawn him back to Calabria, that is, if she even finds out what happened to him. Paul doubts anyone will be intent on leaving a trace this time around, and maybe this is something he should have discussed with Primo beforehand. _Where will you bury me? Will you burn my remains, will you mark the grave in some way?_

He hadn’t paid much attention to Primo leaving the room, though he’s fairly sure he didn’t linger long enough to put on any clothes. Primo can’t have been gone a minute when Paul hears two gunshots outside, wincing each time, his eyes shut tight against an imaginary blood splatter. Then three more shots inside the house, in close succession. His ears ring with remembered sound, Leonardo’s voice telling him to get up, snatching his arm and dragging him to his feet, pulling him around the kitchen table and Angelo’s dead body. The faint strip of light filtering into the boot of the Alfetta had been just enough to make out Berto’s purplish face and his open eyes. Paul scrambles out from under the bed and begins to hunt down his clothes, pulling on his jeans and his old cable knit jumper. Waiting here in a panic is inconceivable. He’s never been any good at staying put, not for a day, or an hour, or even, it seems, for sixty seconds.

He follows the tense rhythm of voices rising from the kitchen, recognising Primo’s with relief as he draws closer. Primo spares him a glance and returns to admonishing his men, mustering a surprising amount of authority considering that he’s standing naked and dishevelled in a pool of someone else’s blood. Across from him is Dante, his burly face unchanged after six years, who grimaces when he sees Paul coming in. The big man beside him Paul had seen in New York, with his black hair slicked back and his bushy eyebrows, that long sloping mouth creased all the way down to his jaw, like he’s never been happy once in his life.

The dead man on the ground seems unfamiliar; Paul doesn’t look at him long enough to be sure.

Primo is talking too fast for him to understand the finer details, but he gets the gist of it - that Primo knew this attack was coming, but that he’d meant for his assailants to die long before they’d reached his house; that he was angry enough about it that he shot one of his own men, and now there are four bodies to dispose of, three of which Dante should stuff in his car and burn somewhere.

 _“In the mountains,”_ Primo decides. “ _Go get Leonardo_ ,” he tells Dante, and turning towards Paul, he adds, _“Get me some clothes.”_

 _“Thank God,”_ Dante mutters.

Leonardo doesn’t seem particularly pleased to have been dragged out of bed at four in the morning. Every new detail about this nighttime visit has him cursing between his teeth, from the broken window to the pool of blood on the floor, to Paul standing in a corner of the kitchen with his shoulders drawn in, his arms crossed tight.

Primo pours Leonardo a glass of the wine he’d sent Paul to fetch in the cellar.

_“I told you this would happen.”_

Leonardo tosses back the wine before he answers; a practiced gesture. 

_“How many?”_

_“The girl’s three brothers. Tell Regina to visit her tomorrow, with the marriage contract… There are no obstacles now, are there?”_ Primo waves a careless hand. _“I’m going back to bed.”_

 _“What happens when he gets shot?”_ Leonardo asks, although he must have known he wouldn’t get an answer, because he looks at Paul when he says it. He might as well have pointed at him, shouting _Here it is, here is your obstacle to everything we’ve built in the past six years._

But Primo only listens to reason when the mood strikes him, and an argument could be made that Paul has never been reasonable once in his life. Besides, he has been through the motions already, he tried leaving of his own free will, he tried going along with Primo casting him out, and it’s led him straight back to the same place: waiting to find out if Primo had died, hoping his mad luck had held out.

“See you later,” he says, before he follows Primo out the door.

“I hope not,” Leonardo grumbles, as he reaches for the bottle of wine.


	14. The Avretti farm

Regina never saw the boy at the time. All she’d had was an image in her mind, conjured from Leonardo’s accounts of him, of some helpless waif-like figure, and she had been surprised to see that the young man in the newspapers afterwards was tall and grim. And beautiful. She remembers that. Despite everything he’d been through (everything they’d put him through, she thought guiltily) he was beautiful.

So she recognises him now, sitting at the big empty table in Primo’s house, sharing a cigarette with her son.

“Mama.” Francesco straightens up when he spots her in the doorway. “ _What’re you doing here?_ ”

“ _Brought you something to eat,_ ” she says, setting down a paper bag of bread and salami. “ _Since I assumed you weren’t getting any lunch up here, watching him_.” She nods at Paul, who leans towards Francesco and stage whispers with his heavy American accent,

“Your mother’s very beautiful.”

He has a dreamy, charming smile, and Regina gets the sense that she is just one in a long line of women he’s used it on.

Just as Primo had instructed, she had taken the contracts over to the Avretti girl this morning – a task she had not relished, least of all because she finds herself becoming easily frustrated with young people these days. Or perhaps just young women. Livia Avretti had kicked up a fuss about not wanting to get married, and suddenly she had Primo (Primo!) jumping through hoops to accommodate her. And look what that got them – four dead bodies, and Leo called away in the middle of the night once again. It was never like that in her day, Regina thinks, and she is not above admitting that she is jealous.

But what was her day, really? What single moment of her life hasn’t been a minute detail in the scheme of some man’s grand design?

Primo has gone down to the port with Leonardo and the others, but before he left, he ordered Francesco to stay at the house, ‘to keep an eye on things’. And so here Francesco is, swapping smoke with the boy whose ear he hacked off all those years ago, as if that were the most natural thing in the world. Regina smiles at Paul as she unpacks the food she brought, but she feels the hair on her arms rising and she thinks, _Why is it that whenever we get talked into Primo’s plans, you are somewhere at the centre of them?_ Then again, how could he not be? He looks as though he was made to be at the centre of everything, or at the very least, the centre of a stained glass window.

Paul offers her a cigarette, which she declines, and then a glass of wine, which she accepts and watches as he darts away into the pantry to fetch the bottle. Briefly she wonders if that’s what Primo keeps him around for, like he gets some sort of kick out of making a billionaire’s grandson pour his wine for him, brew his coffee, keep house and all the rest of it. (Not that this place is what anyone would call ‘kept’, with cracks in the plaster and inches of dust.) But five years seems like a long time to keep up that little game, especially for Primo, who will get bored of a cigarette before he’s even finished smoking it.

No. He’s sleeping with him. Regina knows that. She remembers that time back in January when Leonardo came down the mountain and told her that he had seen the Getty boy mooching around Primo’s grandfather’s hunting cabin. If his choice of partner had been a surprise, the general fact of it wasn’t shocking to her. There had always been rumours about Primo, the kind that would get you a black eye and a few broken ribs if you listened to them, but that only served to make the stories more compelling. She can’t help wondering, now, as she looks at Paul and his slender freckled hands on the neck of the wine bottle, what’s in it for him. She has a hard time imagining Primo holding him, Primo running his hands through all that wild hair, Primo on his knees for him, or is it the other way around? And does Primo Nizzuto press his mouth to that boy’s ruined ear and whisper apologies while he wrings some whimpering climax from him? Tenderness is not a word she would put in the same sentence as that man’s name.

Regina’s grandmother had been a tough old bitch, had fought with a gun on her shoulder in the Resistance, and on the night before Regina’s wedding she’d told her that love is like anything else around here, in this world of farmers and fishermen and seamstresses and olive growers: love is work, love is something that puts calluses on your hands. The Getty boy has smooth hands. She would bet he’s never worked a day in his life.

She is curious about the house, since she doesn’t come up here as often as Leo or Francesco, and Paul doesn’t seem to mind her wandering. In the living room – or what she supposes is the living room: it has a sofa, and some ancient-looking coffee table with an ashtray on it – Regina finds pages and pages of sketchbook paper, torn out and left in scattered piles around the room. Mostly they depict the view from the window, a few watery attempts in paint, but then many more in charcoal, and drawings of hands holding cigarettes, hands holding rosaries, hands holding… Well. (She has a husband and a son, it’s not like she hasn’t seen it all before, but she blushes all the same.) Then there are sketches of Primo’s profile, his aquiline nose, his strong jawline drawn heavily in black, and charcoal handprints on the walls too; she can only guess at what happened there.

This is the kind of blind adoration that winds up leaving calluses on your heart rather than your hands, and she feels a sudden wave of sadness, as if Paul was her own child. _Get out while you still can,_ she’d say to him. She knows, as any woman knows, that some bloodstains never wash out, and in this sense, Primo’s hands will never be clean, no matter how Paul draws them.

But perhaps he already knows that. Regina thinks again of Livia Avretti, how young people today seem intent on revolution even on the smallest scale, intent on doing better than the lives their parents had, no matter the cost. Maybe that is what they see in one another, Primo and the Getty boy: two kicked dogs who refuse to lie down, except for each other.

She hears the familiar sound of the Alfetta roaring up the road, and she shudders before she can help herself. Her grandmother would have told her: all revolutions end in bloodshed.

“ _What are you thinking about?_ ” Paul asks, blinking up at him. Primo hadn’t realised he was awake. It is still dark outside, beyond the broken shutters.

He takes a deep drag on his cigarette and lets the smoke unfurl from out of his nose. “ _Nothing_.”

“Bullshit. You’re always thinking about something.”

“ _Thinking of your pretty mouth, is that what you want me to say?_ ”

“Hey, man, I’m just asking. _You were talking in your sleep_.”

Primo had dreamt he was leaning over the prow of a boat. He’d known it was a dream because he does not care for boats in his waking life; if he wants to feel unsteady on his legs he will polish off a bottle of whiskey by himself. Below him in the water he could see his parents sinking. His mother’s face was vague, as it always is when he dreams of her, but he took off his jacket and dove in to reach her nonetheless. He knew it was her, and yet when he surfaced it was his father he was holding onto. It happened again, and again, swimming down to save his mother and every time coming up for air with his old man, until Primo woke suddenly, breathing fast, sweat sticking his back to the sheets.

“ _And you, what are you thinking about?_ ” he says instead, and Paul looks surprised to have been asked.

“My son, I guess.” He runs a hand over his narrow face. “Haven’t really been much of a father to him this year.”

It’s still strange to think of Paul as anyone’s parent. Primo can’t imagine he has been much of a father at any point, not just in the last year, coked up and trying to drink himself to death in New York’s party scene, or running off to Italy any chance he got. Although, arguably, a neglectful parent is better than whatever Primo had, who knows.

“ _It’s an oxymoron_ ,” he says. “ _A good father_.”

“Maybe. But I’ve got to try, don’t I?”

 _Do you even know where your son is?_ Primo thinks.

Whichever way he looks at it, Paul is a grown man now. Even with his long hair and boyish smiles and all the naivety in the world, time has passed and he has grown up. And yet there are moments when Primo feels like they’re still cycling through those early conversations (for as much as they could be called that): _We could go to Morocco, we could take the money and run, we could get out of here_. As though Paul thinks that if he can just fix that part, if they could give up their lives and become something else the way he’d wanted them to back then, maybe he can undo the rest of it. The hunt through the woods, Angelo Calati’s death, the tunnels and caves and Francesco’s confirmation. The marriage and fatherhood that he fell into afterwards. The family that put oceans between themselves and him.

“I’m just kidding,” Paul says suddenly, never one to let a grim mood hang too long. “I was thinking about your pretty mouth.”

They don’t go back to sleep, even though morning is still hours away. Primo finishes his cigarette and then has Paul in his lap, up against the headboard, Paul’s knees digging against his sides as he murmurs _God, god, bastardo_.

“You know you’re really…” Paul’s eyes seem hauntingly pale as they lie there in the dark afterwards and he reaches out hesitantly to touch the side of Primo’s jaw. “You know you’re beautiful, right?”

Primo laughs. He has always liked the glimpses of himself that he catches in his car windows or in the mirrors of nightclub bathrooms; he knows he looks good, has never needed anyone to tell him that, but if they do then ‘beautiful’ is not the word they use.

“What? I’m serious.” Paul sighs and looks up at the ceiling as though he is seeing the Sistine Chapel rather than peeling paint and shadowy cracks. “It’s always been beautiful here.”

Primo wouldn’t know. Calabria was the place that kicked the shit out of him until he got old enough to kick it back. It is shipping containers full of cocaine; goat piss and hay bales; wedding confetti crushed into the spaces between the cobblestones; bullets and saints; the clinking of glasses in recognition of a body well buried. Primo never thought of it as beautiful at all, never thought about the slant of the light until it was filtered through red hair and blue eyes.

 _Do we all become our fathers in the end?_ He remembers Paul asking that once, what feels like forever ago, when they were sitting in the old apartment that had belonged to Primo’s aunt. What had prompted that, he can’t remember, nor does he recall what he said, if he said anything at all. But he thinks about Paul’s son, and what little he knows of Paul’s father, and he thinks of his own father, of all the blood in the bucket that he’d tried to down Primo in, of all the blood pooling on the kitchen floor last night, the aftertaste of gunfire washed down easily with a glass of wine, and Leonardo looking at Paul and saying _What happens when he gets shot?_ , paired with Primo’s father’s refusal to expand his vision, to overcome his weaknesses for the sake of the future. Cycles of bloodshed and distance and men failing because they put their own needs above the bigger picture. Do we all become our fathers in the end? Primo knows what he would say now, if he was inclined to, which he is not.

“Paul! How... where are you?”

His mother doesn’t say, _I’ve been worried sick._ She doesn’t rush to ask, _Are you hurt_ or to admonish him, _You could have called,_ as she once would have. Paul doesn’t know what to make of the resignation in her voice.

“Italy. I’m alright. I just wanted to... you know. Let you know I was doing okay. I hope you weren’t... worried, or anything.”

“Well, you left a note. Martine said you’d be back once you’d ‘got it out of your system’ - her words, not mine.”

“About the note... I was in a hurry, I had a plane to catch. It probably wasn’t... Can you tell her I’m fine? And Balthazar, too.”

“Maybe you should consider giving her a call,” Gail points out, more gently than he deserves.

Paul twists the cord around his fingers.

“Do you have her number?”

When he gets off the phone - a conversation filled with silences that neither him nor Martine had known how to fill, and that he’d allowed to go on far longer than he should have, considering he wasn’t the one paying for the call - he stays inside the cabin a minute longer. Outside of Primo’s orbit, in the hallway of some Neapolitan hotel, it becomes easier to think. He could go back to the States. He could go back right now. _Balthazar is sleeping,_ Martine had said, and it had been so easy to accept that rather than to demand his son be put on the phone. _Look after yourself, Paol,_ she’d said. _If you won’t let us look after you._

“I don’t want to be looked after,” he tells the empty cabin. “At least, not like that.”

Francesco is waiting for him inside the foyer when he comes out, an unlit cigarette at the corner of his mouth, his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket. His youthful posturing isn’t without its charm and it’s impossible to look at him without thinking that this is what Leonardo must have looked like at that age, pomaded hair and features drawn in ink, reedy like the reed in the fable, the one that bends but doesn’t break.

“Thanks, man.” Paul slaps him on the back. “For the cash and, you know. Driving me here and all.”

“For international calls, it was that or the port. This is safer.”

Francesco’s English seems to improve each time they meet. Paul would like to think it’s because Francesco wants to communicate with him, but even he isn’t so naive that he fails to see the advantages there are to speaking English in what is fast becoming an international drug business. If anything, he’s surprised Primo hasn’t made more progress on that front. If his comprehension has improved, he remains reluctant to align more than a couple words at a time, and when he does so, he mispronounces them.

_“We should go back.”_

“Right now?” Paul would happily have stayed a while longer, to have a look around, maybe get a drink in town. So far he’s enjoyed the temporary escape from Primo’s house - he’s never been good at confined spaces, not before the kidnapping and even less so after, and it doesn’t matter that Primo’s house has three floors and a cellar and a walled in garden right up against the mountainside, and that they’ve begun to fill its emptiness, if only with memories of whatever drafty rooms they’ve fucked in. It remains a perimeter Paul’s been ordered not to leave. The one time he’d tried to disobey the order, wandering into the village thinking he’d buy fruits and cigarettes, everyone had glared at him with the kind of hard-eyed, resentful look that only means trouble, as if he’d once again become the secret none of these people wanted to keep. Outside the grocer’s, he’d run into Leonardo’s wife, who’d stared him down as if he didn’t have a few inches on her before she’d shoved her loaf of bread and her bag of apples into his arms. She’d steered him firmly back up the winding street towards the house.

 _“Easier for them to pretend you’re not here if they don’t see you,”_ she’d said.

 _“Primo won’t be happy about this,”_ Francesco tells him, as he unlocks the car. Suddenly Paul no longer sees Leonardo in him but Regina, those same dark, knowing eyes, patience biding its time and masquerading as an excess of caution. _“We need to go.”_

Paul shrugs.

“I made my bed, right? Now I suppose I’ve just got to lie in it.”

Easier to do so when Primo’s here to mumble breathless Italian praise in his ear. The past few nights however, he’s been held up at Gioia Tauro, negotiating construction contracts at gunpoint. The last time Paul had seen him, Primo and Leonardo had spent the better part of the night discussing the collapse of the steel industry in Primo’s kitchen - Paul hadn’t understood all of it, from the living room where he’d been working on a new screenplay, some folksy story about a town cursed into silence by a temperamental witch. Leonardo had been worried, as usual; Primo hadn’t sounded alarmed so much as in a rush to turn the situation to their advantage. Before he left, he’d told Paul he’d be back as soon as he could. Then he’d realised what he sounded like and he’d shaken his head in disbelief.

 _“What about Paul?”_ Leonardo had asked him, that night in the kitchen.

 _“Paul stays here,”_ Primo had answered, whether because he didn’t want to acknowledge the deeper ramifications of Leonardo’s question, or because he had, and his answer remained the same.

Now Francesco glances at Paul and says, weighing his words, “If you wanted, I could take you to the airport, right now.”

Paul wonders who’s talking to him now, Leonardo or Regina, and decides it must be Francesco himself, because he likes the idea of it, of Francesco striking out on his own on what he must think is the path that will lead them all to safety, himself and his parents and Primo and even Paul.

“I’m sorry.” Paul’s not entirely blind to the mess he’s put them all into. He never has been. “I know I’ll have to leave, but not just yet. Not right now.”

Francesco nods, as if he’d known all along what Paul’s answer would be.

Francesco was right: Primo isn’t happy about their little escapade. 

“ _One thing, I asked you to do – one thing, Getty! You can’t do as you’re told for a day?_ ”

“ _A day?_ You’ve been gone all week! I hate waiting around, you know that.”

The December sun sets fast and already the bedroom is washed with a raw evening light that makes Paul’s stricken face look even more haunting than usual. He’s been wearing the same expression – a mixture of shock and defiance – since Primo got home and marched upstairs, demanding to know why Francesco had borrowed his father’s car without asking. 

“ _You wanted to know about the business,_ ” Primo snaps. “ _This is it. I work and you stay here_.”

“Jesus, I’m not your wife!”

“Oh Primo, Primo, I want to marry you,” he gasps in a ridiculous falsetto. “ _Or is that just for when you’re off your head and getting fucked in your poor wife’s living room?_ ”

“Oh screw you, man.”

“ _Why not? Come here and I’ll fuck it out of you, this bratty little mood_.”

Paul sticks his chin out at him.

“ _Fine then. Do as you like, but inside the house. Understand? If I hear you’ve been on another of your little escapades, I’ll—_ ”

“ _You’ll what? Stuff me in the trunk of your car? Cut my other ear off? Point a shotgun in my face?_ ”

Primo hooks a finger under his chin, swipes his thumb firmly across the seam of Paul’s mouth. “ _Use your imagination, you’ve got plenty of that_.”

Then he strides away, back out to the car, muttering, “ _Fucking Napoli._ ”

“ _You’ve been lucky so far_ ,” Leonardo says, lighting up a cigarette. “ _People seem to think it’s got something to do with money. You and the boy_.”

“ _Then why do you look like someone just took a shit on your morning paper?_ ”

“ _Because luck runs out, Primo_.”

“ _Not mine_.”

Around them the port drones and whistles in agreement, as the two of them walk along the jetty in the brisk morning air.

“ _Someone will take advantage if they find out. You know that. You want to pay $5 million to get him back if somebody decides they’ve had enough of life under your boot heel?_ ”

“ _They’re expensive boots, Leo. Anyone would be lucky to be under them_.”

He’d enjoyed it himself, a week ago, when Paul had worn his leather jacket and adopted a swaggering gait with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, pressing the heel of one of these same boots against Primo’s chest and saying, in a terrible Calabrian accent, “That’s all, ragazzo…”

He shakes his head. “ _Who else knows – your son, your wife, Dante, Renzo? You don’t trust them to keep their mouths shut?_ ”

Leonardo sighs a heavy cloud of smoke, and Primo reaches over to take his cigarette for himself.

“ _Put it out of your head, Leo. We’ve got work to do_.”

“ _Leonardo thinks I should send you back_.”

“ _Is that what you think?_ ” Paul is lying on the floor in the dark, staring up at the ceiling – something he once told Primo he used to do with his mother when the two of them wanted to stop thinking about the world for a while.

What Primo thinks is that he’s owned this house for nearly six years and this is the longest continuous time he has ever inhabited it. He likes to do business himself (if you want something done properly...) so he travels often – Napoli, Rome, Sicily, that fateful trip to New York – but whenever he comes back to Calabria, more often than not he sleeps in his car in between destinations, or when a meeting has been concluded at the farmhouse of one of his associates, they will offer to put him up for the night. Now he wakes up here most mornings to the smell of coffee and cigarettes, which fills up this house more than he has ever been able to, so what the hell would he do with the place if he sent Paul away? The whole building would just be bricks and empty rooms again.

“Didn’t you miss me at all, when you were dead?” Paul asks.

Primo doesn’t miss anyone. Out here, people come into his life and then, either by his will or God’s, they leave it. It would be a waste of time, like missing the livestock they butcher. Even Stefano. Even his aunt. He had missed his mother when he was young, but so much time has passed now, he can’t really remember what that felt like.

Paul raises a cigarette to his mouth, the faint orange glow highlighting the curve of his lips in the gloom. “ _I missed you_.”

“ _I know_.”

“It was fucked up, man, what you did.”

“ _Because it made you cut off your hair?_ ”

But it’s easier to say that than for Primo to admit he’s glad they ran into each other again before Paul had a chance to overdose at some glittering party in uptown Manhattan. So maybe that is missing someone. What would he know?

Paul takes another drag on his cigarette, still gazing at the ceiling. “There’s definitely something wrong with me, isn’t there? I mean, Jesus, I’m married. You make space for somebody in your life…” He draws a rectangle in the air with his finger. “And then they just leave it empty.” He sighs. “ _Do you want me to go?_ ”

“ _I brought you here, didn’t I?_ ” Primo says, and hopes Paul knows him well enough by now to understand.

The following morning, he kisses Paul until he blinks awake, and then pulls away while the boy looks up at him, soft and sleepy and confused.

“ _Be here when I get back_.”

Paul frowns. “Will _you be back?_ ”

“ _If I say so_.”

Primo drives out to the Avretti farm with Leonardo and Dante, one hand on the wheel, talking the whole way about desperate overseas steel exporters who will gladly take on a shipment of coke if it means they don’t make a total loss.

“ _It could work_ ,” Leonardo says, running a hand over his face." _Maybe if things had gone more smoothly in New York, we’d be able to arrange something_.”

“ _New York had nothing to offer us. But things are bad all over, no? There are other cities. We need a broker in America, someone who can put the word out and oversee transportation. Someone who understands how it works on both sides of the Atlantic, with a good head for business_.”

Leonardo glares at him. “ _Don’t even think about it_.”

“ _I said a_ good _head for business, Leo_.”

“ _He signed for a parcel for you the other day with a coloured pencil_.”

“ _Did I say anything? If you keep this up, you can walk the rest of the way_.”

“ _Italy’s steel is really in the shit too,_ ” Dante adds helpfully.

It goes well enough with the Avretti girl’s parents. As well as it can, considering what happened to her brothers last week.

“ _I assure you, Don Primo, the boys acted without my consent_ ,” Salvo Avretti says. His wife has nothing to add. She just stares out of the window, her eyes red, her face pale.

“ _Then we’ll see you at the wedding._ ” Primo nods and waits to have his uncle’s old ring kissed before he leaves.

Livia is in the yard, trying to haul a white mountain sheepdog along on its chain, although the large creature is definitely getting the better of her.

“ _Dante,”_ Primo says, _“be a gentleman and help the lady_.”

Livia looks up. “ _You mean me, or this mangy slut?_ ”

She’s a bold girl, the kind who won’t last long around here. Leonardo looks taken aback in his old fashioned way, unused to hearing young women talk like that.

“ _We had a pack of wild dogs come through here a few months ago,_ ” she says, even though nobody asked. “ _Papa put most of them down, but now this old bitch has four mongrel pups_.”

With a groan, she throws her hands up and lets the sheepdog run off, chain rattling over the rough ground.

“ _It’s a shame._ ” She dusts her hands on an already filthy apron. “ _Any of you want one before Papa takes a shovel to them?_ ”

“ _We don’t need –_ ” Leonardo says, before Primo cuts him off,

“ _Go on then_.”

The drive home is quieter, with only the little dog’s occasional yelps, and Dante’s cry of dismay when the thing takes a piss in his lap. Primo is wrapped up in his own thoughts of a summer evening, years ago, when Paul’s hands had made animals dance across a bare stone wall.

For most of his life, Primo’s main drive was to prove to people that they were wrong about him. His father, Salvatore, that boy whose fingers his father had broken after he’d found Primo kneeling between his legs. A week after that incident, Primo had ridden over to the boy’s village on a motorcycle he had no right to borrow so he could catch him after church. The boy’s face had turned white as a sheet when he’d recognised him, his broken fingers in a splint, his hand hanging loose at his side as if he’d decided he might as well stop using it, even though those large hands had been what had drawn Primo to him in the first place, the strength in them as they held him down. _“If you keep this up, they’ll bury you before you turn sixteen,”_ the boy had called out, right after he’d told Primo in no uncertain terms to fuck off. 

Out of pettiness alone, Primo had driven to Rome on his sixteenth birthday, in a car he had no right to borrow, just so he could prove the boy wrong. He’d talked Stefano into taking him to some college student’s party, and while Stefano sipped apple juice and failed at making conversation in the kitchen, Primo had followed one of the students outside and asked for a cigarette in the kind of tone that meant he wanted to fuck. He’d been high enough at the time to consider this birthday a victory of sorts, even though the boy wasn’t there to see him.

He has only ever been fuelled by spite and ambition and he couldn’t think of anything he’s ever done just to make someone happy, not unless he knew he’d be able to profit from that happiness somehow. When it comes to Paul, he’s paid for hotel rooms and champagne and heart-shaped sunglasses, rubbed coke into the boy’s gums and bought some ridiculously extravagant bathtub with a view to fucking Paul in it, but this is different, this voluntary blindness to the consequences of his actions, this living thing that cost him nothing, that isn’t a display of wealth, a gift that cannot be consumed and trampled and easily disposed of once it’s outlived its uses. 

He leaves Leonardo and Dante in the village and drives alone up to the house, expecting to find Paul scribbling in his notebook or painting the snow-capped mountains and the stormy light, or, a recent development that has had rather debatable results, attempting to cook in the kitchen, where his hair keeps getting caught in the bundles of dried herbs he insisted they hang from the rafters.

Instead, Paul is sleeping with his mouth open in the single armchair in the living room, surrounded by half-drawn sketches and crumpled sheets of paper. He barely stirs at first when Primo drops the dog in his lap, mumbling something incoherent as Primo leans in to kiss him. Maybe Primo should have known what to expect, because it’s the reaction Paul usually has to him, that expression of cautious expectation that’s always been something of an invitation, with a hint of fear in it as well, like he expects Primo to pull the dog away like he used to the coke and cigarettes, even as he folds his hands around it and the pup curls up more comfortably in his lap. No doubt it’s gone sluggish from freaking out on Dante’s knees the whole drive back. The dog’s creamy fur looks even whiter in the fast-fading light.

 _“You look after it.”_ Primo makes sure to voice it like a warning, if it’s to be the last defence he’s got. _“It’s yours.”_

Afterwards it’s something of a relief to step back outside, leaving behind the two of them wrapped up in each other in the armchair. Outside, the mountains are turning black as the village lights up with what electricity Primo could buy it, a vast improvement over the network of old. And yet, the whole valley remains liable to plunge into darkness with the first storm. The bad weather has been a constant of late, _“A bad sign, that,”_ Primo was told. The ancient Don Filippo had stopped by his occasional office at the port the day before, to ask for his help in order to settle some family dispute. _“We’re in for a dangerous winter.”_ Primo had welcomed the news, pouring Don Pipo another glass as he promised to deal with his warring relatives. He nods at Renzo who stands guard in the front yard, lighting one cigarette after the other to ward off the cold. At some point, Paul will come out to offer Renzo whatever bottle might be left in Primo’s cellar, he’s certainly done it before, using this excuse to have someone to drink with as he rambles about constellations. No stars are visible tonight, and in moments the fog on the mountainsides will have descended into the valley. Primo tosses a shotgun into the boot of the Alfetta. He can’t tell if he’s imagining the buzzing in the air around him, projecting the thrill of a possible confrontation onto the very landscape, or if it’s just the onset of the storm.


	15. Tunnels and snow

The Gettys don’t do gifts. They give each other obligations, promises to call in favours, tit for tat. The bicycle Uncle Ronald gave Paul for his tenth birthday meant _Your father better show up at my next premiere, kid._ Even as a child, handing his grandfather a fragment of pottery at Hadrian’s Villa, it had still been a case of _You can have this back if you prove yourself first._ Only winners in this family, right?

So, what’s the deal with this dog?

It has been asleep in Paul’s lap all evening – a warm, fond weight, small enough that he can cradle it in his arms, as he does whenever it stirs. “Hey,” he whispers. “Hi. What did you do to get landed up here with me?”

He always had dogs when he was growing up. And they were his dogs, his stepfather had been very clear about that: nobody else was going to be cleaning up after them. Then Paul had been kicked out of school, and kicked himself out of his mother’s house, and he no longer had the means to feed an animal. (It seems laughable to him now that he had once tried to live off swapping handmade jewellery and naked paintings for meals in sunny Roman piazzas, like it was all so simple, like you could carry on walking on the surface of life without looking down and seeing the rot underneath. Nineteen-seventy-fucking-three, man.) But he’d always thought he would like to have a dog again someday. Less work than a kid, that’s for sure – or rather, dogs expect less from you, so it’s harder to let them down. 

“Yeah?” he says now, softly, as the puppy turns over in its sleep. “So what are you, hm?” Paul scratches it behind the ear. “What does he want?”

Primo must want something. Even trading paintings for food, Paul had been practicing those same lessons his family had taught him: everything has its price. He has to wonder what Primo is trying to buy with this offering.

He must fall asleep again because the next time he opens his eyes, rain is hammering on the dark windows, and Primo is stretched out on the sofa reading something. The light overhead flickers with every gust of wind outside, the cold mountain air putting its shoulder against the house as though trying to push it off the top of the hill.

Paul blinks. “Is that my notebook?”

Primo turns the page without looking up. “Is good. Your writing.”

“Man, are you reading my movie script?” Paul only remembers the puppy just in time as he scrambles out of the armchair, and the little dog yelps as he scoops it up in one hand, diving forward to snatch his book away with the other.

“Oi!”

“It’s not finished yet. And anyway, _does it even make any sense to you?_ ”

“ _Who says I can’t learn, eh?_ ”

“ _You’re going to learn English to read my screenplay?_ ”

Paul has always been under the impression that Primo would rather snort graveyard dirt than speak any other language. They’ve gotten by on Paul’s haphazard Italian and what English Primo has picked up over the years from songs and movies and from Paul himself. It’s not as if they had anything of substance to say to one another in the beginning anyway. In the old days they spoke with their hands, fingers in each other’s hair or between their legs, Primo’s finger on the trigger and Paul’s hands in the air, split knuckles and kisses on palms and Paul casting shadows on the wall. Sometimes he wonders if it wasn’t simpler then – he could ask for what he wanted, coke or cigarettes or a hard fuck on that filthy mattress, and he would either get it or he wouldn’t. Yes or no without explanation. Now there is an underlying danger to their words, like one or both of them could ask for too much. 

Primo leans back on the sofa and laughs quietly. “If I learn English it is for business. _It’s a sad empire that doesn’t look to new horizons_.” He flicks his hand as though trying to get the attention of a waiter. “You will teach me.”

“Right now?”

The little dog wriggles in his arms, full of energy it seems, after sleeping off the anxiety of the afternoon. It whines until he sets it down, whereupon it trots across the living room to bury its tiny snout in the pile of Paul’s abandoned sketches.

“How is Jojo?” Primo asks, as Paul tucks himself into the space on the end of the sofa.

“Who?”

“The dog.”

“Jojo?”

“ _That’s what I said, isn’t it?_ ”

“You remember that?” Paul smiles and looks down at his hands. “I kind of figured maybe you forgot a lot of that stuff.”

“ _Don’t get sentimental on me_.”

Across the room, Jojo flops onto his side, looking deeply overwhelmed. Paul unfolds himself and goes to gather the little dog up again, saying gently, “Oh hey, hey, what’s the matter with you, hm? Yeah, I get it, this place will make you crazy if you’re not careful.”

He settles back onto the sofa, holding the dog against his chest, and Primo says, “ _Oh, so you’ll talk to him but not me, is that how it is now?_ ”

“You hearing this, Jojo? He gets jealous easily.”

Primo rolls his eyes and mutters something in Italian.

“Okay, well first lesson, you can just call me a brat in English next time.”

The following day the sky is raw washed-out blue, as though somebody has scrubbed it with bleach, and there are huge brown puddles filling up the holes in the village roads. Paul watches from the window as the Alfetta tears through them, sending up sheets of dirty water to spatter the sides of houses as Primo heads out of town towards the coast.

“ _Is Primo planning to go to the States again soon?_ ” Paul asks Francesco. He’d arrived early to replace a bedraggled Renzo, who had spent the night sheltering under the porch during the worst of the rain and would probably quite happily have turned his rifle on Primo as soon as any intruder. Francesco is supposed to stand guard outside too, but Paul always invites him in and he always accepts.

“Don’t know,” Francesco replies. “You have a cigarette?”

“Sure, man. But you really don’t know? Haven’t heard him and your dad talking about that?”

Francesco accepts the cigarette as Paul shuffles over on the windowsill to make space for him. “ _He’d be more likely to tell you_.”

“You think so?”

Francesco looks momentarily embarrassed, and Paul wonders if the poor kid actually knows the full extent of what’s going on here. He must, surely. His parents know, after all. Perhaps it bothers him, to think of Primo like that – as a man who fucks other men – when he is so obviously a role model; but then again, it hasn’t stopped Francesco dressing like him.

“Hey, you want to see my dog?” Paul feels partly responsible for Francesco’s moods, so he figures he might as well try and make it a good one.

“ _The one Primo got from the Avrettis? My dad couldn’t get his head round it_.”

“Yeah well, if it helps, neither can I.”

Francesco shrugs. “ _One time there was this girl at school, I used to walk home with her. She always had chewing gum and we'd stick it to the back of her dad’s car. Then she said her family was moving to Reggio, so I blew all my pocket money on as much gum as I could find, thinking she might stay if there was something to do_.”

He takes a long pull on his cigarette, and Paul almost laughs, the way it makes him look like some tragic old fashioned movie star reminiscing about the one who got away.

“I take it she didn’t hang around.”

“ _Would you, for twenty-three packets of chewing gum?_ ”

“That’s a fair offer, should have put that to my grandad back in the day.”

But Paul gets what he’s saying. The offer is being made to him now. All things have a price, whether it’s paintings in Rome or shards of pottery in crumbling villas or sticks of gum in the Aspromonte, and maybe he’s been a Getty too long not to see life in terms of transactions, maybe Primo’s the same. Maybe language is irrelevant and this is the only way they know how to talk to each other, and in bringing him this little white dog, Primo is simply saying what Francesco tried to say to that girl.

They spend the better part of the morning ripping the stuffing out of one of the sofa cushions and using it to line an old wine crate that Jojo could use as a bed, although the puppy seems far more interested in chasing stray feathers across the living room, and Francesco is delighted, his rifle forgotten, propped up in the corner, while he grins with an almost childish abandon that Paul has never seen in him. Perhaps it was the way he’d looked that afternoon before he climbed the mountain to the cave. No amount of sacramental wine or blessings from God made him a man that day, but Francesco certainly wasn’t a child anymore after that.

Paul asks him about college, which he is hesitant to discuss, but it seems he has considered studying in Rome. His father is eager for him to go.

“Would you study accountancy, like him?”

“ _My father didn’t go to university._ ” Francesco doesn’t look at him, focuses on rubbing Jojo under the chin instead. “And no, I would study history. Italy has an important history, I think. _You have to understand its past in order to plan for its future_.”

He says this like he’s reciting it, and Paul can only guess from who.

“ _What did you do at university?_ ”

“Man, I didn’t even finish high school.”

Francesco kicks him lightly. “It shows, hippy.”

They are in the kitchen eating bread and salami when they hear the knock at the door. Francesco tells him to stay put, and picks up his rifle (still too long and weighty for his skinny arms, Paul thinks) almost gleefully.

Paul isn’t sure what worries him more – the thought of Francesco gunning some stranger down in the doorway, or the thought of him freezing and not being able to pull the trigger when that stranger has a gun of their own pointed at his head. He waits for all of thirty seconds before creeping into the hall behind him, unsure exactly what he’ll be able to do, but feeling again that it’s somehow his job to keep an eye on Francesco, as much as it is Francesco’s to keep an eye on him.

To his surprise, it is a woman’s voice he hears. She has a thick Calabrian accent that he cannot fully understand, but she wants to speak to Primo, that much is clear. _Don Primo_ , she calls him. Paul has never heard that before.

“ _I can take a message for him_ ,” he says, emerging behind Francesco.

She is a short girl with a dark complexion and an even darker stare, and she looks deeply unimpressed by Paul’s Italian. She says something to Francesco, who shakes his head.

“What does she want?” Paul asks.

“She wants to talk to Primo. Says her father lied to him.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know! _She isn’t making any sense_.”

The girl is quite red in the face, and Paul can see now that she is breathing heavily, as if she ran all the way here.

“ _I can take a message for Primo_ ,” Paul tries again, slower this time.

“ _Don’t talk to me like I’m stupid_.”

Francesco groans. “ _What’s going on, Livia?_ ”

“ _You two want to take a message? You tell Primo my father’s a lying sack of shit. He was meeting with my uncles last night, about what happened to my brothers, and they want blood for blood_.”

Francesco flings questions at the girl all the way to the phone, when will they attack, where, at the port? How many men? Livia barely hesitates on the threshold before she follows him inside and Paul is left to close the door and trail behind them, trying to keep track of their fast-flowing dialect. Livia is shaking her head in annoyance: Francesco isn’t getting it.

 _“They’re not going to Gioia Tauro. They’re coming here. They’re coming for_ him _,”_ she says, with a contemptuous nod in Paul’s direction.

By that point, Francesco has got a hold of someone on the phone and he rushes his way through an explanation as Paul glances out the window. The sky is as dark as it has been for the past week. Up here it will rain, higher up it might snow. Jojo trots in and immediately gets himself tangled up in the girl’s skirts, Livia looking up at Paul with the kind of expression meant to express that it doesn’t matter if Paul’s presence here befuddles her; she’s not about to be taken in by him.

 _“The dog was for him?”_ she asks, even though Francesco isn’t paying her any attention.

Paul isn’t sure how to gauge the urgency of the situation. Should he be offering her wine, the way he usually does Francesco or Renzo when they show up? Or cigarettes, or a drawing, like the portrait he’d made of that old lady who came by the day before to deliver a whole crate of apples as thanks for something Primo had done for her. Paul hadn’t been able to suss out what that was, if Primo had helped her buy the orchard or tend to it, or if he’d murdered a nosy neighbour or some ungrateful nephew.

 _“Why me?”_ Paul wonders. _“Your family, I don’t know them. Why are they coming for me?”_

Francesco gets off the phone in time to translate Livia’s answer:

“It’s a rule you don’t go after women and children, but you’re not a woman, are you?”

  
  
  
  
  


Francesco couldn’t talk to Primo, although he seems confident that whoever he talked to will pass on the message. That, or he’s putting up a front to try and convince Paul and Livia that the situation isn’t as desperate as it looks.

“I was told to look after you,” he tells Paul, as he rummages in the back of the cellar, shoving boxes and crates of bottles around. 

In the past few weeks, the cellar has become the most crowded room in the building, in part because of the offerings Primo keeps bringing back, everything from crooked old wine bottles to sacks of potatoes, radishes and cabbages, silverware stacked in a lidless box where it’s already begun to turn black in contact with the air. Paul’s been coming down here for bottles and preserves ever since he arrived at the house. Whatever Francesco is looking for, which has caused him to prop his rifle up against the wall and scuff at the ground each time he’s moved a box aside, Paul doubts he’ll find it. Livia is watching the proceedings in silence, after Francesco and her bickered all the way down the stairs, and if he thought it’d get him anything but a black stare, Paul would ask her what she’s doing here. Maybe she thinks she can get something out of this. Stacks of lire or another factory or a better husband than whatever man Don Primo chose for her. Meanwhile, Jojo has found an apple and he chases it excitedly from one end of the cellar to the next, until he runs straight into a bag of chalk and bowls over. Paul goes to retrieve him, picking him up with what is already a practised gesture, securing his body against his chest.

 _“Here,”_ Francesco calls. _“I’ll try to topple something over it once we’ve gone in.”_

The trap Francesco has uncovered opens onto a hole in the ground. Paul looks about as dubious as Livia, but Francesco doesn’t give them much time to reconsider, striding over to the cellar’s single lightbulb and pulling the cord, plunging them all into darkness. He guides his way back to them by the flickering flame of his lighter.

_“Come on, get in. They might not know this passage, but they’re going to be looking for us, we need to get as far as we can.”_

“What about the village?” Paul says. It’s a stupid suggestion and he knows it, but he can’t help himself. Something about cramped spaces. He’s had one too many dreams of choking on too little air in the boot of a car, his face pressed against a dead man’s grotesquely swollen face. He made up his mind a long time ago that he wouldn’t die underground.

 _“They’d watch them shoot you down and wouldn’t bat an eyelid,”_ Francesco says. “Get in, hippy.”

Paul obeys him and it’s only later that he’ll understand why, as the four of them are progressing through the underground tunnel, Paul ducking his head to avoid the low ceiling, holding Francesco’s lighter, Francesco and Livia behind him and Jojo up ahead, trotting in a few inches of water, turning back every so often to make sure they’re following him. It was the nickname, that vaguely dismissive _hippy._ Francesco had sounded just like Angelo in that moment, much as he had all those years ago, when he’d called Paul _hippy_ by the side of a goat trough. Francesco and his talk of universities, who carries his rifle like it’s too big for him and can spend hours happily playing with a puppy, who’d tried to help Livia down the ladder before she snapped at him to keep his hands to himself.

“You can’t just become friends with someone around here, can you?” Paul says, keeping his eyes on the narrow tunnel ahead. “Everything has to be some life and death shit, you sign a pact and there’s no going back from it.”

At first he thinks Francesco didn’t hear him, or didn’t understand what he was trying to say, but after a few moments of silence, his voice rises from a few feet away, echoing off the walls of the tunnel.

_“You and Primo are friends? That’s a strange word for it.”_

_“What are you going on about?”_

_“It’s none of your business,”_ Francesco tells Livia.

_“I never liked you, you know that, right?”_

_“I never liked you either.”_

Paul smiles to himself.

“What’s this place anyways? Where are we going?”

 _“Most of the houses around here have tunnels like this one,”_ Francesco explains. _“Some of them are centuries old. The one under my father’s house connects with the sewers. I’ve only been in this one once, Primo took us down here after he had it cleaned up, after he moved in. I think it’s the only actual work he did on the house. It’ll take us someplace safe and then we can just… Wait. For Primo or my father to come and get us, when they’ve sorted things out.”_

 _“I’m not spending several days stuck somewhere with you two,”_ Livia warns.

 _“Well, why did you come along, then?_ ” Francesco snaps. _“Good god. You know what your problem is, Livia? You think you can always get your way. Life doesn’t work like that.”_

 _“Good god,”_ she mocks him. _“You sound like your father. You’d have preferred me to stay in that kitchen, wouldn’t you? My father would have beaten me bloody if he’d found me there.”_

Francesco falls silent after that, although as their even slog through muddy water turns into a sharp incline, the three of them climbing now rather than walking, Paul thinks he hears him mutter something like an apology.

They emerge in the foothills of the mountains, on a hillside covered in snow. Jojo once again takes off ahead of them, bouncing around in a paroxysm of delight until he collapses panting and spent at the foot of a tree. Paul goes to retrieve him and casts a look back at the darker hillsides below, what he thinks might be the village lights blinking in and out of the fog. It’s not night time yet but it’d be easy to think otherwise, with this sky the colour of overripe plums, the rising wind blowing snow into their faces. Somewhere in the distance a dog begins to bark and Paul shivers, tightening his hold on Jojo who whimpers against his coat.

“Let’s go.” Francesco leads the way towards the trees, the rifle slung over his shoulder. _“It’s good that it’s snowing. It’ll cover up our tracks.”_

Paul hasn’t had much occasion to walk around lately and it’s not long before he’s falling behind Francesco and Livia, the warm, sleepy bundle in his arms slowly turning to lead. One moment he can see them climbing a snowy slope up ahead, venturing deeper into the forest, and the next he’s alone, snow melting through his socks, sliding into his shoes. Paul wonders if he might not be better off sitting down into the snow, with the dog tucked inside his coat to keep the both of them warm. Primo would find them, eventually, though there’s no saying how long that would take. One morning during those two weeks they’d spent at the cabin, Primo had tried to teach him a few things about tracking, but it had been about as conclusive as the shooting lesson. Paul looks down at the puppy, a tuft of white hair poking through the open collar of his coat.

“I think maybe the two of us should…”

“Paul!” 

Francesco has tried to keep his voice down but it still resonates through the bare trees. 

“Come on. It’s close.”

  
  
  
  
  


The hideout is nowhere as large as Primo’s hunting cabin. To find it they had to cross a frozen stream, reaching a portion of the forest that’s mostly evergreens. The hut is nestled in the middle of a group of tall spruce trees. Inside, Livia has kindled a meagre fire in the tiny stove; aside from the stove, most of the space is taken up by a small table and stool and a few metal crates.

 _“There’s some food in a cache under the house,”_ Livia informs them. _“We could cook something.”_

 _“The smoke will give away our presence,”_ Francesco counters, but they still open a can of some sort of stew and heat it up on the stove. Paul watches the two of them move around the hut, clumsily at first, bumping elbows and hips, exchanging quips, until they find a rhythm and learn to work around each other, Francesco taking care of the food as Livia breaks the lock on one of the chests and retrieves cutlery and musty covers that she turns into makeshift beds. The three of them eat side by side on the floor as the fire dies out in the stove, with the blankets pulled up almost to their ears, Paul feeding Jojo bites from his stew.

 _“Someone will be here for us in the morning,”_ Francesco assures them. Livia is about as unconvinced as Paul, but neither of them says a thing. In the dying light, Paul casts a few shadows for them on the irregular planks of the wall. A wolf, a bird, a bear. He’s too tired for a story, but maybe the shadows speak for themselves, telling tales of freedom and flight, of unrestrained movement, of restless hunger.

The three of them fall asleep close to each other, the dog curled up on Paul’s legs above the blankets. Paul weaves in and out of sleep, slipping into strange dreams in which he wanders through New York, calling Primo’s name far more readily than he would if he was awake. Livia and Francesco carry on a whispered conversation that goes on for hours after they’ve settled down on the wooden floor of the hut. Paul hears bits and pieces of it, and understands bits and pieces of that. Details about the girl’s intended husband, who thinks highly of himself because his family owns a big transportation business in Calabria. That’s why Primo wants her to marry the man, she explains, because his trucks will prove instrumental to transport the coke out of the port. Livia had despised her elder brother Domenico, less so the other two, but they’d chosen to throw in their lot with Domenico against Primo and now all three of them are dead, and soon her father and uncles will be dead too. 

_“That’s not how Primo does things,”_ Francesco murmurs back. _“Murders can be difficult to cover up, sometimes it’s worth paying the right price to buy someone instead of killing them.”_ Paul has no trouble hearing Primo’s voice behind Francesco’s words. 

_“If my father dies I’ll bring my new husband a good inheritance,”_ Livia points out.

_“You’re always so cold about everything. Remember when we were kids, and that branch you were sitting on broke and there was a splinter in your arm the size of my thumb, and you wouldn’t cry about it?”_

_“You’re saying I should have?”_

Francesco thinks about it for a second.

 _“I’m saying, sometimes it takes a lot of useless energy to pretend things don’t hurt you, when you could have used that energy to heal._ _Do you want to marry him? The guy with the trucks?”_

Livia is silent for a long time. When she speaks again, it’s to snap,

_“Do I have a fucking choice?”_

When Paul wakes up again, light is filtering through the uneven boards. Francesco is sleeping on his back, snoring slightly, Livia’s dark head tucked under his chin. Realising that it was Jojo who woke him, scratching at the door of the hut, Paul drags himself up and pulls on his coat.

Outside the dog disappears in an instant, a white flutter on the white snow, recognisable only by the occasional yelp as he jumps out of a ditch or scrambles over snow-covered roots. Paul sets off in a different direction from the day before, walking towards the light as it rises through the trees, until he finds the edge of the forest. He follows it to a lonely, windy ridge. Beneath him the valleys are still silent, the hilltops shrouded in snow. Lighting himself a cigarette, Paul glances quickly behind him to make sure he hasn’t lost Jojo, but the dog is still chasing his own tail under cover of the trees. A minute and they’ll go back, but for now Paul will breathe in this landscape of a pale sunrise above rugged mountains, store it somewhere to be retrieved at a later date. He doesn’t try to think ahead much anymore, not beyond the next moment he’ll spend with Primo, and the one after that. _This is a good place to die,_ he thinks, his eyes following the path of a hawk across the valley. _But it’s a terrible place to love someone._

The men wait until he’s finished his cigarette to approach him, as if maybe even they couldn’t quite bear to disrupt the slow quiet of the sunrise. Much as he had in Rome, all those years ago, Paul lets himself be kidnapped, not because he intends to be complicit, this time, but because it’s difficult to argue with a shotgun when it’s loaded and pointed at your throat.

They set off along the ridge, two men in front and two behind. Paul doesn’t look back, so he doesn’t see Livia standing in the shadow of a spruce tree, holding the dog fast against her, whispering nonsense in his fur so it won’t give away her presence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> unrelated to this fic, of which a considerable amount remains to be posted, but we have written several other Paul/Primo stories since last summer (a variety of AUs, some long, some ridiculous) and were wondering... if anyone was interested?


	16. Kitchens

“ _How the fuck did this happen, Leo? You told me, you said nobody knew –"_

“ _No, no, I told you to send him back where he came from, I told you this was going to be trouble –"_

Primo aims a kick at the door frame, sending down a shower of snow from the roof outside. In the little cabin, Jojo whines and burrows deeper into Livia Avretti’s lap.

They had tracked boot prints through the snow for nearly two miles, but lost the trail at the road. Primo’s jaw aches from grinding his teeth, enough coke in his system that he feels like some asbestos-riddled building, like if someone took a hammer to him he’d be nothing but powder and poison on the inside.

Francesco stares up at him, boyish despite the rifle he had fumbled for when they burst through the door. “ _I’m sorry –_ ”

Leonardo ducks in front of him, slightly out of breath from the long trek through the snow, but then he’s often like that whenever he squares up to Primo, as though that confidence takes effort. He stands between them now, Primo and his son, with such nervous ferocity that Primo is equal parts impressed and disgusted. Wasn’t it Leonardo, aged sixteen, who ran to the priest’s house to say _He’s killing him!_ the day Primo’s father beat him with the buckle on his belt so hard he knocked out three teeth and left him with a deep dented scar between his eyes? _As if I’d ever lay a hand on your boy_ , he thinks.

“Salvo Avretti…” He snorts another pinch of coke from the box in his jacket, shakes his head and blinks hard in the eerie dawn light now seeping into the hut. “ _Him and his brothers, what have they got? A farm on the other side of the mountain?_ ”

“ _Tomaso Avretti owns a fishing boat,_ ” Leonardo supplies after a moment, grateful, it seems, to have something practical to say.

“ _Good. Dante can deal with that, I need you with me, back at the port_.”

“ _What do you mean, ‘deal with it’?_ ” Livia pipes up. “ _I tried to help you, don’t –"_

Primo rounds on her, his breath steaming in the frigid air. He doesn’t knock women about, as a rule, but if the girl gets her feelings hurt this time, that’s on her. Who the hell was she to demand things from him in the first place? Some peasant’s daughter? If it weren’t for her, they wouldn’t be in this mess now.

“ _Tell Dante_ –" he holds Livia’s gaze as he addresses Leonardo “ – _burn it all_.”

It’s not enough. He could burn every stick of wood her family owns and it wouldn’t even the score. They stole from him. His own goddamn men, they stole from him. Is this how his uncle had felt, on the day of Francesco’s fateful Confirmation? Betrayal is a gutting knife, it enters at one end and just keeps on dragging until you’re split open. That is the only lens through which he can look at this for now. A lifetime of bloody knuckles, absent figures and rosary beads has left him poorly equipped to deal with it any other way.

“ _Wait, wait_ –” Leonardo catches up to him as he strides out into the snow, puts a hand on his arm and then removes it just as quickly. “ _Just think about this. It isn’t going to be like before. You can’t ask people to mobilise for you, not for this_.”

“ _I’m not asking_.”

“ _How will you explain it to them, eh? Fuck, Primo, use your head. You’re going to order them to trek over the Aspromonte in the middle of winter to find_ him _? You can’t, tell me you understand that, for God’s sake. It’ll cost you more than money. It’ll cost all of us_.”

“ _So we leave him? Think carefully, Leo. You’ll be the one writing his mother to explain about her dead son._ ”

Leonardo shakes his head bitterly. “ _For now? Yes. We leave him. They’re not stupid, they won’t kill him; no matter what Livia said about blood, it’s the money they’re after. So we wait. They'll call._ ”

What Livia said. Nothing but bad news from Livia Avretti, and he never should have listened to Paul, about giving her what she wanted. Paul who can barely see beyond the end of his own sentences. Now look where they are. _Who the fuck cares what Livia said?_ he wants to say, but he knows Leo would scold him for it, and he doesn’t have the patience to play out those particular roles today. Him the petulant child, frustrated by his own words even as he barks them, the way his anger obstructs his ability to plan ahead; and Leonardo with his moral high ground, firm with him in a way that Primo finds unbearable, probably, ultimately, because it is kind.

“ _Get back to the car,_ ” he mutters, waving Leonardo away. Kindness today would be as good as taking a hammer to him. “ _And turn the goddamn heater on_.”

Before he takes his leave of this freezing hovel, Primo goes back inside, scoops the little dog out of Livia’s lap, ignoring her protestations, and marches out the door.

  
  
  
  
  


He had never really put the two things together – handing Angelo Calati a shovel and ordering him to dig, driving up the mountain to get gasoline, and the thought that Paul would actually be dead by the time he got back. He knew what he’d asked, so drunk he could barely stand, and he’d expected it to be done, because people like Dante and the Calati boy always did what they were told. But he can’t say for sure what he’d have thought if he really had come home to find Paul lying in that shallow grave in the garden – his blue eyes staring sightlessly at the sky, hair pressed into the dirt, hands still and cold at his sides. His clever hands that could do magic with light and shadows, freckles in the crooks of slender fingers, which always found their way to tangle in Primo’s hair.

In those days, Paul was a loose end, and Primo would be lying to himself if he said he hadn’t thought about tying it up the same way he’d done for the Calati boy. You could mix business and pleasure, he’d made a habit of that, so long as you kept it impersonal. But that day in the kitchen, standing across from him with the bloody mess of Angelo’s body between them, he had looked Paul in the eye and pressed a kiss to his rifle: _Arrivederci, tesoro_.

He’ll find him. It was a shot he didn’t take then in ’73; a shot he didn’t take at that party in Rome in ’78, a shot he hasn’t taken every day since, and he’ll be damned if some nobody like Salvo Avretti is going to blow all that to hell now.

Paul has always angled to put a name on it, whatever this is, and really, what can Primo expect from a boy who got married at seventeen? Frankly he can call it whatever he likes. What they have is a shared loneliness, which does not seem so huge when they’re together. So Primo will find him, because of all the ways he’d once thought about killing Paul, this would be the cruelest, the one that Primo had saved him from in the end. Dying in the dark with strangers, away from the trees and the sky. All alone.

  
  
  
  


The call doesn’t come through until late afternoon, when the sunset is already staining the sea red. Primo rarely uses the phone at his house, preferring to be contacted at the port, and now his little prefab office above the harbour is dense with a full day’s worth of cigarette smoke.

This morning’s anxiety has generally worn off, too exhausting to maintain, and now Dante is lying on the floor blowing smoke rings at the ceiling, while Leonardo has settled into his weariness as though putting on a familiar cardigan. Only Primo is still wired, kept alert by coke and nicotine, and he alternates between pacing the short length of the office, or leaning back in his chair with his feet up on the desk, while Jojo noses into the folds of his jacket, seeking whatever scent of Paul is still clinging to his clothes. That’s a strange feeling to Primo, like being in New York and knowing Paul was there but may as well have been miles away, or whenever he’d drive up to Rome after their run-in in ’76 and the city still had a shimmer to it, as though a ghost had passed through. He can’t imagine he smells like anything other than sweat now, still wearing the same clothes he’d put on yesterday morning, but in his jacket is the small twist of Paul’s hair they’d once cut to send to the boy’s mother, and Primo touches two fingers to his pocket, rubs Jojo with his free hand, and murmurs, “ _Easy now, easy_.”

He is grinding out another cigarette when the phone on the desk starts ringing, and the three men sit up in unison. Primo nods at Leonardo, who reaches for the receiver.

“ _I’m listening_.” Leo is silent for a moment, his brow creasing. “ _A proposition_.”

“ _So the old goat really does want money?_ ” Primo laughs sharply. “ _What a fucking joke_.”

Leonardo’s frown deepens. He passes the phone to Primo, who tucks it between his shoulder and chin, one hand still keeping a firm hold of the dog.

“ _You want to talk business, old man? You should have thought of that before you abducted my business partner_.”

“ _Is that what he is?_ ” Salvo Avretti’s slow, ponderous tone is agitating after the day’s long wait, and his words stir up teenage memories of backhands and crushed fingers and the taste of blood in Primo’s mouth. They should have burnt his farm when they had the chance, nothing like a little fire to make you think on your feet. It’s what Primo would have done, had this situation involved anybody else. But no, it’s always the billion dollar boy backing him into a corner, ever since Paul gave him the slip and took off with Angelo Calati. He could kill him for this, but the thought is an old rifle he no longer keeps loaded.

“ _I had three sons_ ,” Salvo says. “ _There is no amount of money you can offer to replace what you have cost me_.”

But there is, Primo thinks, or else we wouldn’t be here now. “ _Out with it_.”

“ _The port_.”

Primo snorts. “ _Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?_ ”

“ _The man who exchanged a boy’s ear for an empire. And now we do the same – we will have control of Gioia Tauro by noon tomorrow, or you will have him back in three pieces, for my three boys."_ Through the crackle of the line, he hears Salvo spit. “Primo Nizzuto. Ricchione.”

  
  
  
  
  


That long summer in ’78, Paul was always moaning about wanting to visit some gallery or other, and why wouldn’t Primo come with him, it’s not like they had any other plans.

“ _Speak for yourself_.”

“But we’re in Rome! I mean, come on, look around you, _everything is about art_.”

Primo had flopped back on the bed and pretended to snore.

“Oh, bold move,” Paul had said, “from the only guy I know who actually enjoys opera.”

They never did make an evening of it, neither the Borghese nor _La Bohème_ , but once, in Positano, Primo had come back from a phone call to find Paul gazing at postcards outside a cafe – little miniature prints of paintings that all looked much the same to him, bodies like ripe peaches embracing or dancing or cowering beneath Heaven’s gaze. Paul’s taste in art was, like many things, both dramatic and banal.

“This one,” Paul had said, pointing to a picture of a man leading a woman by the hand out of the shadows and the distorted figures of the background. “Orpheus and Eurydice. _My grandad has the real thing in his museum_.”

“ _Good for him_.”

“I don’t know, man, I always figured they got it wrong. You know, _the Greeks?_ ”

Primo, who, being Calabrian, was as much an Ancient Greek as an Ancient Roman, simply shrugged as he lit up a cigarette. “ _Does it matter?_ ” He was looking at the sunburn on Paul’s shoulder, thinking how he might bite down on it later.

“They always frame it wrong, when really it’s a story about trust, right? Eurydice trusted Orpheus to get her out of there, she was staking her whole life on it, but he wouldn’t even trust her to follow him? That’s the real tragedy.”

But Primo thinks perhaps he understands it now, Orpheus looking back over his shoulder in the underworld. It wasn’t that he hadn’t trusted Eurydice – he had loved her. And what is love in the world’s harsh places if not the constant fear of loss?

  
  
  
  
  


By tomorrow at the latest, he will have Paul back. Paul whose family wouldn’t pay the ransom for months - well, Primo won’t pay it either, but he’ll get him back in one piece if he has to double cross and murder every last member of the Avretti family. The Avrettis might be peasants, but they’re a proud, old-fashioned lot, who kissed his uncle’s ring but often ate at his table. They had been among the first to rally to Primo’s cause after Salvatore’s death.

 _“We shouldn’t have killed his sons,”_ Leonardo says. A concession, that _we_ , when Primo can hear the reproach in his voice.

_“Maybe I should have let his sons kill me.”_

Primo rises from the desk, relieved to finally have something to do that isn’t merely waiting for a traitor to dictate his terms.

 _“Keep an eye on this for me,”_ he orders, putting the dog in Dante’s arms. “ _Leo, you’ll talk it out with them, whenever they make contact again. Promise them a bigger share than what they have at present. The old man knows we won’t give him the fucking port, so tell them that they can have a few facilities. Maybe some empty land to develop into whatever the fuck they want. In the meantime… We prepare for war. Put the word out that Salvo has his eye on the port. Make sure to remind people he has no idea how to run that kind of enterprise. It’s not a farm, it’s not a goddamn olive oil mill, and as far as I know, that’s about the extent of the idiot’s abilities.”_

Leonardo’s worried eyes follow him to the door, where Primo stops long enough to snort what little cocaine he has left. He licks his fingers afterwards, as if that would turn up some more, lingering a moment too long on a memory of Paul doing the same thing, not so long ago. Sometimes he’d hold Primo’s head in his lap, his slender thumb spreading the coke on Primo’s gums. In those moments Primo closed his eyes. It was as close as he’d ever come to letting his guard down.

 _“Where are you going?”_ Leonardo asks.

Maybe it’s that “we” from earlier that impels him to answer.

_“To talk to the girl.”_

  
  
  
  
  


It would be easy to blame this whole mess on Paul. Primo is tempted to do so. It’s likely however that the Avrettis were dissatisfied from the start, unwilling to commit to any kind of marriage contract that didn’t suit their aspirations, the sons dragging their father along like an ill-assorted team of horses struggling to pull an old cart. If this was the case, Paul’s suggestion was never going to work; what Livia herself wanted didn’t matter, and her brothers would not have been content with whatever Primo might have agreed to give them, which admittedly wouldn’t have been much. And yet, there might still be a way to take a leaf out of the boy’s book.

Livia Avretti sits at Regina’s table, a cup of coffee between her hands, Francesco at her side. They are conferring quietly when Primo arrives, dark heads bent together, although they straighten up when he walks through the door. This conversation will be Leonardo’s to handle, or Regina’s, maybe, in the near future before the situation gets out of hand. Of all the girls in Calabria, of course Leonardo’s son would let his eyes linger on the one that causes trouble.

 _“Up,”_ Primo tells her. _“You’re coming with me. I need to find your father.”_

Livia lifts her chin. _“I don’t know where he is.”_

_“Then you’ll take me to someone who does. Your mother, your aunt, your grandmother. They can give him up, or they can lose more sons. Come on.”_

Briefly he considers telling Francesco to stay behind, but it might do to have someone to watch his back.

 _”Take your father’s rifle,”_ he decides, as he marches Livia through the door.

  
  
  
  
  


Running through the underground tunnel in the early hours of the morning, rifle in hand, Primo could hardly have imagined that the rest of the day would play out in a succession of Calabrian kitchens. Tablecloths patterned with faded flowers and scalding coffee fresh from the pot, dark-eyed women following his every gesture like they expect him to break something. Primo tries not to take their mistrust personally, in spite of the circumstances. It is a well-known fact that in Calabria men will use out instruments as well as people until they fall apart, and women must then pick up the pieces, less to fix them than to secure them away, adding them one after the other to some invisible shrine. _Nothing much to do for women down south, is there?_ his late aunt had told him once, when he’d stopped by her house during one of his early trips to Rome. _Aside from praying and mourning. And when you move away, the grief moves along with you._ Primo had been eighteen at the time, and his main reaction to this little tirade had been to pity Stefano - no wonder he’d turned out the way he had, if that was the sort of smalltalk they shared on a daily basis - but he’d listened to his aunt all the same, storing this knowledge of women away to be used at a later date.

First he sweeps through Regina’s kitchen, encountering her in the hallway on his way out, as Francesco picks up Lenoardo’s rifle. Regina doesn’t say a word as Primo leans in to kiss her cheek, her disapproval etched between her brows, in the sharp pinch at the corner of her mouth. Francesco lets himself be pulled into a hasty embrace, his narrow face suddenly suffused with colour.

The second kitchen is Tommaso Avretti’s wife. Reluctant to return to the family farm, to try and pry information out of her bereaved mother, Livia decides to take Primo to her aunt. As she voices it rather plainly, grasping the door handle as Primo takes another sharp turn on the road leading from the village to Tommaso’s house in the valley, Tommaso is the second son, and thus the one who stands to win or lose the most after Salvo himself. Wrinkling her nose, Livia adds, _“He’s also smarter than my father.”_ Primo had attended Tommaso’s wedding as a teenager. He’d even danced with the bride, Salvatore slapping him on the arm afterwards, _“Not bad, eh? Avretti’s a lucky man.”_

Valentina Avretti has not forgotten that occasion either, who tells Primo as she drops another peeled potato in her basin of water, and wipes her knife on her apron, _“I’d twisted my ankle, and you took my hand and walked me to a bench. What does it say about me that I remember something so trite? What does it say about you, Primo Nizzuto, that your kindnesses are rare enough that I still remember this one after twenty years?”_

She’d looked different, back then, beautiful maybe. Her face grey with the sort of exhaustion no amount of sleep will ever wipe away, she continues to prepare her soup with quick, angry gestures, wishing maybe that she could turn her knife against him, instead of the mound of dusty potatoes on the table. Tommaso and her have two sons, and one grandson whose baptism Primo had attended some months ago.

 _”It’s not for me to tell Tommaso what he should or shouldn’t do,”_ Valentina says. _”He wouldn’t listen to me if I tried.”_ An honest answer. _“I don’t know where they are, and what they took from you. They should have known better.”_ A succession of lies.

Letting the knife clatter on the table, she wipes her forehead with a grimy hand.

 _“You should go talk to the old woman,”_ she says.

  
  
  
  
  


The third kitchen belongs to Salvo’s mother Lucia, who spends a long time watching him across the table, a small, foggy glass of red wine in front of either of them, the black of her dress and shawl seeming to swallow up what little light there is in the room. Francesco is the first to break the silence, knocking a pair of rusty scissors off a worktop as he shifts his weight from one leg to the other.

 _“Which one are you?”_ the old woman asks at last, leaning forward slightly to try and make out Primo’s features. _“With eyes like these, you’re one of the Nizzutos, aren’t you? Restless and hungry, the lot of you. Do you know there used to be a saying about your family? That you live for the hunt, and die along with your kills.”_

Primo thinks of his father, whose appetite for hunting had decreased the more he took to drinking, and of Stefano, who’d never hunted anything once in his life, although he might have been restless and hungry, in his own way. It had taken some guts to fuck off to Rome the way he had.

_“I’m sure you have many stories, signora, but that’s not why I’m here.”_

_“This is Primo Nizzuto, nonna,”_ Livia supplies, stepping away from the door. _“He’s the one who kidnapped…”_

 _“Shut up, child.”_ Livia steps back, face tilted sideways as if she’d been slapped. _“I know who you kidnapped, Don Primo. Isn’t it about time you sent that boy home?”_

Primo takes a sip of his wine. 

_“Your son must know there’ll be hell to pay if he dies.”_

_“My son is beyond reason. He lost his future overnight.”_

Of the two of them, Primo is the only one who glances at Livia where she stands quiet and shame-faced, her hands balled at her sides. Primo leans back against his chair.

_“I won’t give in to Salvo’s ridiculous demands. He won’t stand down. There’s only one way this can end, and nobody will profit from it. I’ll hunt them down. If the boy dies, we’ll be hunted down. Everything I built will go up in flames, all those things that the people around here have become used to over the past five years. Roads and street lamps. More money coming in each month than your generation has seen in a lifetime.”_

_“You’re right.”_ Lucia picks up her wine and drains it in one long swallow. _“I do know many stories. There’s one you must have heard. They say an ‘ndrina is like a tree: the capo and his accountant are the trunk of that tree, the branches are the men of honour, the twigs their underlings. The flowers…”_ She gives Francesco a crisp nod. _“The flowers are the youth. The succession. And the leaves are the men condemned to die and rot at the foot of the tree. If you kill all the Avrettis, you’re not just pulling a leaf off that tree. You’re hacking off branches. Do I need to explain to you how unwise that would be? You won’t live long if you turn your back on Calabria, Don Primo.”_

_"I’m listening.”_

_"The boy leaves. You send him back to America. Salvo’s brothers will stand down.”_

Livia makes a sharp sound at this swift condemnation of her father, but neither Lucia nor Primo pay her any attention. Primo knocks back the rest of the wine. When he speaks his tongue is still warm with it, a taste of this old world where acceptance is a birthright, where trees aren’t filled with sap, but with blood; where every prayer is an admission of guilt.

 _“We have an agreement_."

  
  
  
  
  


_“What will we give Salvo’s brothers?”_ Leonardo asks.

Primo looks out the phone box at the sleepy little village square, three old men playing cards whose names he could remember if he tried hard enough, a woman dragging a reluctant child by the wrist, Francesco and Livia sitting side by side by the fountain. Livia is wringing her hands, trying not to cry. Francesco is hunched over his father’s rifle, trying not to comfort her.

 _“Whatever they want”,_ Primo shrugs, knowing Leonardo will be exasperated by his tone and drawing some vicious pleasure from it. “ _Salvo’s factory, his sons’ businesses, the restaurant and whatever it was Domenico was doing. Maybe we’ll throw in a small piece of the port. Someone will have to repurpose those steelworks. Ah, and tell Gio Neri that he’s no longer marrying Livia Avretti. We’ll find him someone else. Someone whose father and brothers we can trust, who won’t ask for what she can’t have and start a goddamn war.”_

 _“Did Livia Avretti really start that war, or did you?”_ Leonardo says, who’s never been one to hold his tongue in Primo’s presence, not that Primo has ever wanted him to.

 _“The girl and her mother can keep the farm”_ , Primo allows, magnanimous.

  
  
  
  
  


Across from the factory the mountainside is densely wooded. Primo thinks of Lucia Avretti for a moment as he raises the rifle, peering through the scope at the Avretti brothers. All four of them are gathered inside the machine room, precisely where he was told they would be. _You live for the hunt, and die along with your kills._ No part of him will die when he takes this shot and Salvo crumples to the ground, but it’s not Salvo that he’s been hunting with a passion for the last six years.

Primo thinks of Lucia Avretti for a moment as he raises the rifle, and then he takes a steadying breath, his finger on the trigger, and thinks of nothing at all.

  
  
  
  
  


Salvo’s men disperse as he climbs down the slope, running off to their cars and trucks, Salvo’s brothers among them. Primo finds Paul in the control room, like he’d been told he would, hands roped to a radiator, a burlap sack on his head. A familiar sight, much like the tumble of red curls when he pulls off the sack, and the old fear in Paul’s blue eyes. At several moments in his life, Primo drove hundreds of miles as he tried to leave behind some mess he didn’t know how to fix, only to realise upon arrival that he’d taken the mess right along with him. This - Paul haloed in dusty light, looking at Primo like they’re right back in that sunflower field and Primo has just asked him to hop into the boot of his car atop two dead bodies - is one of those moments.

 _“Let’s get you home_ ,” Primo mutters, pulling out his knife to slice through the rope.

He’s not thinking of his house at that point, or even of America. All he’s got in mind is the Alfetta, waiting for them in the nearby woods.


	17. The Alfetta

The train rolls on through the pines, their shadows so long in the evening light that they could reach out and touch the boys as they clatter by.

“I know what you’re thinking, man. You don’t need to say it.”

Angelo leans over and takes the cigarette from Paul. “I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“But you’re thinking it.” Paul settles onto his stomach, his cheek pressed against the sun-warmed wood of the wagon. “I thought he… I don’t know. I’m sorry, man. I didn’t think he’d react like that.”

“Come on, hippy. He killed two people the day you met him. I should know, I had to bury them.”

“He always seems like one thing and then it turns out he’s something else.”

Angelo sighs, breathing out a long plume of smoke, and then leans against the side of the wagon, tilting his head back to catch the last of the muted golden hour on his face. “He’s just Primo. If you were from here you’d know that’s all there is to it.” He pats Paul on the shoulder. “You were lucky.”

“Lucky you didn’t want to bury me too, I guess.”

“Lucky your shoes are still in one piece. Look at mine, falling to bits. Can I bill your grandfather for a new pair?”

“You can have mine, if you want.” Paul rolls onto his back, stares up at the bright sky ribbed with tree branches. “I really miss you sometimes, man.”

After a while, Angelo says, “I know,” but it isn’t quite right. Paul can never get his accent quite right.

“All this shit that happened, it’s so heavy, you know? Jeez, maybe you don’t. It’s so heavy to carry it with me all the time, but somehow it’s not so bad when he’s around. God, I know how that sounds, trust me. But my family, Martine, they don’t get it – it’s like they’re all just waiting for me to be happy again, and every day that I’m not they take it so personally. It’s fucked up but he’s the only other person who was there, he’s the only one who knows what it was like. This day… the woods, the running, the blood on the table… We don’t even talk about it, but sometimes it just helps, knowing we both remember that. We don’t talk, but he’s the only one I could talk to if I wanted.”

Angelo smiles sadly at him. Paul doesn’t think he could bear to try and make him speak and remember his voice all wrong again.

“I’m sorry,” he says instead. “Really sorry.”

Sometimes Angelo forgives him, sometimes Paul’s mind interrupts itself before he can say anything at all. This time his internal dialogue is shattered by the gunshot, and Salvo Avretti’s body slumping to the floor.

  
  
  
  
  


He barely registers the walk from the factory, through the trees to the car. It feels like his feet are far away from his body and he is simply drifting along trying to catch up with them. He wants to take his clothes off and burn them. He wants to climb into a hot bath and burn his skin too, scorch every last trace of this ordeal off of him.

He doesn’t want to be touched. Not with the harsh, assessing hands of the Avrettis. But between passive and active, he does want to hold onto something, anything, and in the solitude of the car, he grips Primo’s arm like it’s an anchor being hauled up out of some churning black sea and carrying him along with it.

“I thought you were going to leave me.” It sounds so pathetic when he says it like that. “I heard them, what they were asking, the port – I knew you wouldn’t … Too much for too little, right? Jesus…”

He had told them that too, and he has a split lip to prove it. _If you really wanted the port, man, you should have kidnapped his fucking car instead_. Salvo Avretti had not wanted to hear that.

“ _You weren’t wrong_ ,” Primo says, after a moment. “ _Handing over Gioia Tauro was never on the cards_.” His tone is detached, practical. Business-like. The one he uses when he wants people to think he couldn’t care less one way or another.

“Jesus,” Paul mutters again, letting go now and wiping his nose with the back of his hand. His stepfather used to say he was an ugly crier.

He has the taste of blood in his mouth from the cut on his lip; it makes him feel sick, and he goes so far as to put a hand on the car door, thinking he might have to get out and vomit, but Primo clasps his shoulder, pulls him back, and Paul feels himself crumple like paper as it burns, curling up against Primo’s side.

“I want to go home, man, please, I just want to go home.”

Primo looks down at him with a strange expression. It reminds Paul a little of the way he’d looked that day Paul had found (and broke) the photograph of him and his cousins as children. At last he says, “ _You will”_ , and puts the key in the ignition.

The light between the trees flashes like camera bulbs as they drive, and Paul looks away, looks at Primo’s hands on the wheel instead. If not always steady then at least confident, in their every gesture. He can’t imagine Primo dealing with the last day’s events with anything other than confidence. Had he worried, even for a moment?

“Thank you,” Paul mutters, half bitter, half sincere. “ _For not letting them cut me up_.”

Primo nods. “ _I would have killed them,”_ he says, business-like again, and leaves it at that.

  
  
  
  
  


Paul realises now that uncertainty has been a luxury all these years. Knowing that he and Primo existed on the same trajectories every once in a while, bound to collide, was just as intoxicating as anything he drank or snorted or swallowed at his uptown parties. He’d loved the ambiguity of making coffee for him, with him, of hearing his car pull up outside, of hanging herbs in the kitchen, of moving furniture around, always thinking maybe, maybe, who knows? Except now they both know. It cannot work, no matter how hard they tried; not here. In Rome, in New York, even in London, they had space and distance enough to be other people, other versions of themselves, _what could have been_ s in some other reality. But in Calabria, the past catches up to them, every time.

He doesn’t argue when Primo tells him what has to happen now. Going back to the States feels like it was always inevitable, even while Paul had allowed himself to swing between possible eventualities – the likelihood of growing bored and seeking some new horizon vs. living it up as some coked-up gangster’s moll for the rest of his life. But he doesn’t want to feel rope around his wrists ever again. Or be reminded of the way light filters through a burlap sack over his face. To get away from that, he’ll go back to grey New York and its fading starlets, his famous friends who forget about him until he’s doing something outlandish enough for the tabloids to take note of, who tell him he can talk to them any time, about anything, but they don’t understand a word he says. Wherever he goes, that family name, with all its riches and trouble, tracks him down. At least in New York it won’t get him killed.

They stop at the house to pick up the rest of Paul’s things. Jojo bounds up to greet him, wet nose in the palm of his hand as Paul gathers him to his chest, pressing his face into the little dog’s fur.

When he looks up, Primo is watching them. _“He missed you,”_ he says, and shrugs.

He is not what Paul would call a tender person. This place doesn’t breed tenderness. And when life takes and takes from you, it is probably difficult to know when it’s worth giving anything back. But in the bathroom he runs a cloth under the warm water and wipes the dirt and sweat from Paul’s face, the way he once wiped away Angelo’s blood, as though to say _There, that is over now._ It isn’t, but he lets his thumb rest on the scab on Paul’s lip, and when Paul doesn’t move away, he seems to take this as a sign, leaning down and kissing him. It is something, to be touched gently, after all this. Paul puts his hands either side of Primo’s face, and then his neck, then his shoulders, and his arms and his waist, like he can somehow imprint the feeling of him onto his fingers and take it with him when he goes, like a ghost image on an old lithograph.

  
  
  
  
  


They are loud about it, or at least Primo is, muttering like a man at prayer, rapidly, breathlessly, pressing his face to the hollow of Paul’s hips, his fingers to the scar on his ankle. Paul bites the inside of his cheek to stop himself from saying the sort of thing that usually comes to mind when he has his legs around Primo’s waist; it hurts, but in the end it will hurt less than voicing things he can’t have. Afterwards, they lie in silence, broken only by a cockerel crowing far away outside, the sheets strewn about their waists, Primo’s face buried in his hair, one arm slung over his shoulders.

“ _We could go to Marrakesh_.”

Paul laughs sadly. “You’d hate it. That’s the thing I never told you all those times, man: you would have gotten sick of it so fast. Crowded as hell and the liquor sucks.”

“I am joking, Paol.”

“I know.” He swallows. “But we could go somewhere. Anywhere. Not London, not New York, not Rome – there are other cities. _There’s a whole world outside of Calabria_.”

Primo scoffs. “ _I’ve seen it_.”

They don’t say anything for a long time after that. Paul just lies there listening to their breathing as it slips in and out of sync, and then eventually Primo rolls him over. He doesn’t kiss him at first, just holds Paul’s face in his hand, stares at him with those always-hungry eyes.

Quietly, Paul says, “ _What am I going to do?_ ”

“ _What you always do. Paint. Dance. Drink. I want to see you in another magazine_.”

“ _With my clothes on or off this time?_ ”

“ _No one sees you like this –_ ” he runs his hand along Paul’s side and over his bare hip “– _except me_ ,” and he says this so firmly that Paul believes him for a moment, as if they have both forgotten that Paul has a wife. Primo seems briefly vulnerable then, in a way that Paul has never considered before. He doesn’t think of it like an affair – the texture of the two relationships is entirely different, like trying to compare smoke and water – but the fact remains that he has a different life to go back to, has always had that, and meanwhile Primo has this empty house and a hole in his cellar that means he can make a quick escape if he needs to.

Paul kisses him, since he’s not sure if Primo is going to, and the room returns to its silence, whatever words the two of them have left to say now swallowed up in each other’s mouths.

What else was there anyway? _You already know it all by now_.

Only arrivederci.

  
  
  
  
  


In the end, Paul has two requests of him.

“Hold onto Jojo for me, will you? I don’t think he’s really a city boy.” The little dog is running circles around his legs.

Primo frowns. “ _It’s your dog_.”

“ _Until I get back_.” He has to say that. He can’t bear not to.

He gets the second thing in the back of the Alfetta in the airport parking lot in Rome – the second and third thing, then, Primo raising his head from between Paul’s legs only to hear, “Hey, man, _can I keep your boots?_ ”

“ _You want boots? I’ll buy you boots_.”

But Paul wants these with the worn down heels that show the way Primo walks, how he leans on the outside of his right foot too much, a little pigeon-toed in the left.

“ _I’m not driving all the way back to Calabria with no boots on_.”

“Then buy some for yourself, it’s not like you can’t afford it. But man, I’m having these.”

  
  
  
  
  


They pinch his feet on the ten hours to JFK, and it turns out there’s a hole in the left sole that immediately soaks up the New York damp as Paul steps out into the autumn drizzle. But it’s something else to focus on, to keep his mind off the way Primo had kissed him at the end, on each cheek: a proper Italian goodbye.

The city seems as it did when he first washed up here back in January – too loud and frenzied and uncaring, too far from mountains and pines and good coffee.

Martine has been and gone, leaving the trace of her perfume and the jasmine joss sticks that she favours lingering in the apartment, but she has put most of their furniture in storage downtown, she says, in a note left on the countertop that adds:

_Gone west with B. Call your mother._

_Didn’t know if you wanted to keep the painting so left him where he is._

_See you sometime. x_

He finds the painting in question on the easel in the living room, right where he left it, and he can’t believe he forgot. Primo sitting in the window, the broad sweeping shadows of his shoulders, the bold outline of his nose and jaw and the sinews of his neck. All in black except for the eyes, those hungry blue eyes.

Jesus what was the point of it all, if he can’t even have him?

Paul does call his mother, albeit a week later, or at least he tries to anyway. She was in San Francisco, but a friend says she has gone down to Dallas for New Year’s, and Paul thinks glumly _Good for her_. Seeing Chace always seems to do her good, and at least one of them should get to spend New Year’s Eve with people they actually care about. This prompts a lousy afternoon of mooching around liquor stores and park benches, briefly enlivened by dancing home in his new boots, revelling in the way the wear and tear almost makes him walk like Primo, but then he gets back to find he has missed a call from his mom, and his bleak mood returns with a vengeance. He promises to attend about a dozen different parties, but when the hour comes and the ball finally drops in Time Square, he is half-naked, downing a bottle of Jack Daniels, and it’s like this, pressing his lips to the portrait on the easel, that he kisses goodbye to the Seventies.


	18. Berlin

Early spring in San Francisco when the wildflowers are just starting to push their way through the cracks in the sidewalks and the air hums with the static of AC units and telephone wires. Ostensibly, Paul and his siblings are here to visit their mother, who says she is happiest whenever they are all together again, but that morning the four of them head out to the Tennessee Valley unsupervised and wander from the meadows all the way to the craggy shoreline.

“So are you and Martine getting a divorce or what?” Mark asks.

Paul and his brother are crouched in the cool water, waiting for another wave to lift them. Their sisters, who had no desire to take off their clothes in front of the boys, are back on the beach drawing patterns in the sand.

“No.” Paul pushes his wet hair back from his face and sniffs. He can still feel traces of the powder in his nose from the bump he took in the bathroom before they headed out. “I mean, I don’t think so. I hope not. Besides, if something happens to me and we’re still married… Well, she’s all set, you know? Balthazar will be fine. That’s what it’s all about.”

Actually he hasn’t seen his son in weeks. Martine says she thinks this is for the best, “for now.”

“What do you mean ‘if something happens to you’?”

 _If I happen to me_.

“Paul, are you okay?”

“Wait, man, hold on, here we go…”

The wave hits them square in the chest, knocks the breath out of them and hurls them backwards into the water.

“What are you dumbasses doing?” Ariadne calls.

Mark doesn’t bring up the conversation again. They lie on the sand drying in the sun, and it’s a good morning. It’s always good when they don’t talk about things. Paul thinks maybe he will put this in his letter.

  
  
  
  
  
  


He has never been much good at writing letters. He used to try and write to his mother when he lived with his dad, but in the end it became a chore, and he has always had trouble doing anything when he knows it is expected of him.

However, this letter has become something of an obsession, trying to get it perfect. He is running out of time to send it, or it will get there too late. There are various attempts scattered around his room, discarded because they seemed too sappy ( _I missed you today, and yesterday, and I bet I’m going to miss you tomorrow._ ) or too banal ( _I’m shooting a movie with some friends. Might wear your boots_.) or too spur of the moment ( _I dreamt you were in my room last night. Had to stick my fist in my mouth while I got myself off so no one would hear me_.)

That last day in Italy had been strange. He hadn’t really been able to process it all at the time, too shaken from his ordeal with the Avrettis, but looking back on it now, it was like the drawings his sisters had made in the sand this morning, a line that seemed so solid when you looked at it, then so easily rubbed out. They had been bleeding into one another at the end, and Paul wonders now if, running off with Primo’s boots, he hadn’t somehow wound up on the other side of him.

 _Hiked up to the twin peaks this evening where you can see the city on one side and the mountains on the other. Made me think of you. Get out of my head. Bastard_.

He had tried to call him at the house. Got nothing for nearly two weeks, and in the end, after one too many glasses of brandy, he’d cut off a lock of his hair and stuck it in the post, regretting it as soon as he closed the mailbox, so much that he tried to stick his arm in and fish it out again.

He’d tried writing about that too: _Okay so I went a little crazy, but I was hammered, and why won’t you talk to me? Are you mad at me? You’re the one who said I had to leave,_ but that seemed too whiney so he screwed it up and tossed it away.

For a while, he does as Primo told him: paints, dances and drinks, which he would have gladly done anyway. San Francisco is good for all of that. Old friends have gravitated here from LA and New York, musicians and artists he used to know when he knew himself better. He paints the sea and Alcatraz. He goes on a road trip down the coast with the twins and Bob Dylan and gets so high he forgets most of it. He hosts parties in the backyard pool, mixes his own potent cocktails, lets one guy rub sunblock on his shoulders just because he has a moustache – and when Ariadne says, “You are being careful, aren’t you?” he pretends he doesn’t know what she’s talking about, how the men in this country are dying in their thousands.

San Francisco is fine, but it isn’t home. _Dear Primo. Dear dear Primo. Come and get me out of here_.

In the end, Paul decides to just get to the point: _I’ll be in Berlin for the film festival next week. There’s a flight to Rome that gets in at seven in the evening. Do you still keep your account at the Residenza?_

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


In West Berlin, Paul gets off the plane and heads to a party, in his usual, haphazard way: he meets a young French actress during the flight who plays a secondary role in one of the films in competition, is quite taken by the way she laughs, uncompromisingly loud, and he decides to tag along with her to a restaurant where she’s supposed to meet up with some of her film crew, in part because he likes the idea of being introduced to Max Von Sydow. 

“He's still sad about his divorce,” the actress tells him in the taxi, the sort of out of context gossip that Paul usually doesn’t care for, that hardly qualifies as conversation, so he kisses her for a while, until he glances out the window and sees Jutta in the street with a group of friends, more animated than she usually is, walking backwards as she illustrates something with her hands. _Tipsy,_ he thinks, though it’s to do with Martine’s absence, too. Jutta generally lets her be sociable for the both of them; when Martine isn’t around, she becomes, if not gregarious, at least slightly less prickly. When Paul all but throws himself out of the taxi, she welcomes him with open arms. 

_Definitely tipsy._

Paul never makes it to the restaurant, following Jutta to the terrace of a cafe where someone strokes his thigh under the table and pushes a packet of coke between his legs, the question as obvious as the offering. Looking up he recognises George, last name unremembered, a British documentary filmmaker that Martine used to work and sleep with, who’d made no mystery of his dislike of Paul at the time. 

“I’m a performance artist now,” George says, as if that also explains his change of sexual orientation, “I film people’s thoughts,” but for all that Paul finds that statement amusing, the art is part of the reason why he follows George back to his flat and lets him kneel between his legs as the films in question play out on one of the roughcast walls of the living-room, the projector whirring on a repurposed bar stool, Paul getting off on watching a succession of people lost in thought rather than because of the guy’s mouth or his nervous fingers digging into Paul’s thighs. Hours later he lets himself be filmed, sitting cross-legged on the couch with a cigarette in hand.

“There’s something romantic about you,” George says, meaning Romantic, maybe, “Yes, that’s good, keep looking down.”

“Do you want to know what I’ve been thinking about?” Paul asks him, only for George to shake his head. 

“Absolutely not!”

He’d been about to say something stupid on purpose, something indecent and stupid, even, in the hope of more sex to a black and white background of old men sitting thoughtful on benches, thoughtful women walking through art galleries and a man thinking to himself on a bridge; _This one wants to jump,_ Paul had decided. Maybe they could even have fucked while the projector played the images George had only just filmed, of Paul wearing his jeans and nothing else, thinking of Primo and nothing else.

That first night heralds the start of a long week of films at all hours of the day and parties that last through the night, until Paul misses the closing ceremony, waking up in a big shot producer’s hotel room with no idea of how he got there or of where his clothes might have gone. He borrows whatever will vaguely fit him from the producer’s luggage, a black turtleneck, trousers that stop short of his ankles. Primo’s boots he finds by the door. He heads out to a bar he’d been to a few days before, and from that bar to a basement full of smoke and liquor and by the time the sun begins to rise behind the clouds, he’s in someone’s flat with a persistent nosebleed, looking dazedly at the blood and white powder on his fingers. Jutta stops at his side long enough to press a cool glass against his temple and then inside his hand, noting, “That whiskey’s the same colour as your hair” before she drifts off. Paul downs the whiskey and steps out into the pale morning of an unknown city, and maybe he hallucinates the rest of it, the tall Scandinavian man who holds a silk handkerchief against his bleeding nose and tells him he should take a walk to clear his head. 

“I was looking for you,” Paul says, like this is all some amusing coincidence. “Or I think I was, it was several days ago… To be honest, man, I don’t really know what I’m looking for, but I have a plane to catch this evening and I thought, maybe I could just walk until then.” 

They wander through the city, bustling even at this early hour, Paul chatting about the horror film he’s supposed to star in the following year, a story of hikers and cannibalism. Eventually, inevitably, maybe, they end up looking at fresh graffiti on the newly-rebuilt wall.

“I’d write something too, if I knew what to say, or I think it’s rather that I have something to say, but I don’t know what it is.”

“Isn’t that the purpose of art, to take over when you can’t find the right words?” the man says, which sounds preposterous enough that Paul thinks maybe he did make him up, some idea of what Max Von Sydow would sound like in some artsy film, rather than the real thing.

“Could you lend me money for a taxi?” he asks, all the same. “I’ll pay you back in Cannes, or Venice, or wherever we see each other next.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


The jetlag he didn’t feel in Berlin catches up with him in Rome, unless it’s the aftermath of a week of partying hard on little food and little sleep. Paul checks in at the _Residenza_ , where the desk clerk seems to have been expecting him.

_“Ah, yes, Mr Nizzuto. For two nights, isn’t it?”_

Paul is tempted to say that no, he intends to stay longer than that, but he hasn’t heard from Primo in too long and he’s no longer sure how he'd react if he were to outstay his welcome. His daring consumes itself, so that he only smiles, one hand held out for the key.

Primo doesn’t show up. 

Paul spends the first day holed up in his princely suite, subsisting on a diet of fruit he’d originally thought might be fake judging from how shiny they were, artfully arranged in a basket on the marble console table in the entryway. He wraps himself in a hotel bathrobe and sleeps for hours on end, waking up long enough to draw himself a bath and soak in it, staring at a line of unexplained bruises on his knees, before he falls asleep again, in the bathtub, eventually dragging himself up and out and into bed, where he sleeps for a further ten hours. On the second day, he indulges in several scenarios where Primo arrives and joins him in bed (pressing him down into the mattress with a hand on the back of his neck, the other between Paul’s legs) but it doesn’t do much to replace the real thing. Orange slices and Paul brushing coke off Primo’s moustache, the tangible weight of Primo’s strong body bearing him down. By the middle of the afternoon, when Primo has failed to materialise, Paul picks up a crime novel he’d lifted from the side of Jutta’s bed after she’d let him crash at her hotel for a few hours; remembering the twisted bed sheets, the imprint of her mouth in red lipstick on the pillow, the cigarettes and magazines and clothes strewn across the concrete floor. The pang of nostalgia for their old Roman selves is so acute that he decides to head out and make a round of Marcello’s old haunts, hoping he won’t have to go all the way to Ostia where Marcello had moved a few months ago, after he’d inherited a house from some uncle or cousin.

The hotel clerk calls out to him as he walks past her in the hall, Paul stopping at her _Mr Nizzuto,_ something unfurling inside him at the name, curiosity and unexpected pleasure. _So that’s what it feels like, to be somebody else._ He’s never been any good at it, he who had foolishly given an old woman his real name when he was on the run with half of Calabria’s population hot on his heels.

 _“Someone called and left a message for you,”_ the clerk says.

The message leads him to an address in Trastevere, a two-floor building with irregular windows, the ochre, damp-stained coating peeling off the facade, a trattoria on the ground floor. Since Paul has nothing to go on but that address, no name or floor number, he hovers by the trattoria for a while, eventually sitting down and ordering a glass of wine with the one Italian bill he finds in his wallet. He’s still sitting there an hour later, nibbling breadsticks and sketching in his notebook, when a white dog wanders up to him, briefly stopping at Paul’s side before he pads off to the next table where a woman immediately begins to stroke his head. Paul watches him with rising interest, wondering if he could lure him back with a breadstick, when he hears the sharp call, “Jojo!”, followed by a quick whistle. He almost upends his glass in his haste to get up, standing there with an absurd smile in the clothes he’d borrowed or stolen in Berlin, not knowing what to do with his hands, and when looking at Primo proves too much, he kneels down and lets the dog come to him. 

“Look how you’ve grown, I didn’t even recognise you,” kissing the grey patch on his muzzle, “I should have, though, you haven’t changed all that much,” his body going still when Primo’s fingers slide into the hair at his nape.

 _“It’s longer,”_ Primo notes, the only words they exchange until an hour later, when Primo gets off of him and lets go of his tight grip on Paul’s shoulder and Paul can finally raise his head off the pillow to take a look at the room. There isn’t much in the way of furniture, but on his way in, he thinks he’d glimpsed a familiar artwork on the wall of the living-room, a red canvas with a diagonal slash like a gaping wound. He’d been far too caught up kissing Primo to do much more than blink stupidly at it.

“No more hotels?” he asks.

Primo sits back against the headboard as he lights a first cigarette and puts it against Paul’s mouth. Somewhere outside the bedroom, Paul can hear Jojo running himself ragged, colliding with what seems to be every single item of furniture in the flat. Primo reaches over the side of the bed for his leather jacket and drops a key at Paul’s side. 

“No more hotels,” he says.

  
  
  
  
  
  


“How come you never answered the phone?” Paul asks, toying with the apartment key. He hasn’t let go of it since Primo handed it to him the day before, even as they’re lying in bed passing a cigarette between them, while Jojo sprawls on the floor, swatting at dust motes with his tail. “I called the house like a million times.”

“ _I’ve been busy_.”

January in Calabria had brought fresh snowfall and bitter winds that pulled down the power lines, plunging the village into wariness and candlelight. The Alfetta finally gave out on the unplowed mountain roads, nearly tipping Primo over a sheer drop, and he’d had to hike the final five miles home, only to receive news from Renzo that the Camorrista with whom they’d managed to broker a deal had been shot, and that Dante had knocked up a girl in the village whom Primo had been intending to marry off to Gio Neri after the Livia Avretti situation fell through.

Besides, he generally keeps his distance from the house these days. The place is just bricks with traces of Paul stuffed into the cracks – his hair on the cold pillow, his sketches crumpled up under the sofa, the black charcoal smudge of his fingerprints on the kitchen door frame. No, Primo rarely goes back there. He has returned to his old habits, sleeping in his car or his office, once blinking awake from a hangover slumped against Leonardo’s kitchen table. Francesco watches Jojo for him more often than not (eyeing the dog the same way he used to eye Paul: with wary fondness), but sometimes Jojo accompanies Primo up into the hills, the pair of them moving sharp and stealthy through the trees, teeth and claws and bullets, an old companionship between man and animal, older than the woods they stalk. The dog follows him without question, races off into the depths of the forest to follow the scent of blood and bring back any number of felled birds and rabbits. Not grown enough for a proper hunt yet, but Primo intends to take him along when the day comes. In preparation, he tries to teach him the lay of the land, to show him the landscape that raised him, safe in the knowledge that Jojo won’t have any quips to make about the hollow where Primo once spied his mother lying down with a man who was not his father, nor the ravine where he fell as a boy and skinned his knees and hands climbing back out, or the river - dried up now - where he once held a classmate’s head under the water. Primo does not dislike Jojo’s company, nor the strange solidarity that comes from the pair of them having watched Paul walk away.

“You got my letter though,” Paul says, his chin on Primo’s shoulder as he waits for the cigarette. “Or you wouldn’t be here.”

“Your letter and your hair. _Thought I told you not to go cutting any more of it off_.” He digs his fingers into the roots of Paul’s curls, doesn’t tell him how he’d pressed that scrap of him to his nose, hoping for some trace that wasn’t there. “ _Postmark said you were in San Francisco_.”

“Yeah, man. It was okay, I guess. I got to see the mountains. You’d have liked it better than New York. Probably.”

Probably not. American mountains – full of coal mines and animal bones and hunters who pay money to camp around a feeder and take potshots at hungry deer like fish in a barrel. Tourists in their own wilderness, Americans.

As if sensing what he’s thinking, Paul rolls onto his back, one hand still closed around the apartment key, the other drawing lines in the air above them with the cigarette, watching the thin blue trails of smoke it leaves behind, “ _I’m always happier here. I think the people are more real. You know, I met this guy in Berlin who wanted to film me_.”

“ _Let a lot of men do that to you, do you?_ ”

“Asshole, it was for art. He makes movies about people’s thoughts; probably wouldn’t like me calling them movies though. It was cool, but he gave me way too much direction, bet he did that with all the others too. It’s the same in the States, man, everybody is living some performance art piece every day. But here? I don’t know, when I picture myself I’m always in Italy. I didn’t recognise myself in George’s movie. You know what I’m saying?”

Primo reaches over to take the cigarette back. “Do you?”

“Man, I’m going to regret ever trying to teach you English.”

“ _So your famous friends, what do they think you’re doing in Italy?_ ”

Paul shrugs and smiles breezily, turning over the key in his hand again. “Nothing, really. Told them I was going to see my man in Rome. I think they thought I was talking about my drug dealer.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Sleep is a private thing for Primo. It is inevitable, he supposes, like any bodily function, but for most of his life, he has preferred to endure it alone. Knocking himself unconscious with booze and drugs, or a fitful hour or two snatched here and there with his hand always resting on his pistol. But he had slept sometimes at the Calati house, in that dirty little room, with one of Paul’s long arms thrown bonelessly over him, until Primo felt too closed in and would shove the boy away. He rarely slept in those early Roman summers either, left Paul buried amongst expensive pillows and rumpled sheets and went to prowl around the city in the dark, sometimes ending up at his aunt’s old apartment where he would catch a few hours of solitary rest. But then there was no privacy at his grandfather’s cabin, and he got used to the warmth of Paul’s body in that cold bed, waking sometimes with his face pressed into those bright curls, and he would roll away quickly then, but in sleep his body would always come back for more. There were times, even in his crumbling house in Calabria, when he would wake to find Paul’s face nuzzled against the crook of his neck, long limbs wrapped around him because always, always Paul wants to hold onto something, to claw affection out of everything and anyone, and at those times Primo would feel as though there was something hard and solid in between his lungs, and he would slough the boy off like an unwanted second skin and take to the hills with his rifle in the small hours, or simply sit downstairs and smoke his way through a carton of cigarettes. Distrust has had enough decades to settle deep in his bones. Perhaps that is why he is always trying to find four walls to contain Paul, to keep him somewhere of his own where the boy has no distractions and nothing to do but throw his arm over Primo again in his sleep.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Paul wants to go out dancing. Apparently people don’t dance in Berlin, they snort their coke sitting down with slow jazz in the background.

Primo rarely dances these days either.

“Oh no, I understand,” Paul says, perched on the edge of the sink, trying to pierce his good ear in the mirror. “I mean, you’re what, nearly forty now? Probably hard for you to keep up, huh.”

“ _You’re a little shit_.”

“And you’re a mean old bastard.” Paul’s reflection smiles demurely at him. “You got any coke? Might liven you up.”

The phone rings while Primo is in the process of wrestling him backwards into the bathtub, Paul clutching at the shower curtain, laughing and ripping it down in the process. The only person with this number is Leonardo, and sure enough, his familiar sober tone comes through clear as a dog whistle.

“ _The whole village better have burnt down, I’m in the middle of something_.”

“ _Ah, Primo_.”

He sounds so solemn that for a second Primo thinks something has happened to Francesco, and he’s already halfway through plotting the quickest route out of Rome when Leonardo says,

“ _A letter came for you. From Milan. It arrived at the post office, the sender didn’t seem to know your address, but…_ ”

“ _Out with it, Leo. It’s not about the Caivano girl, is it? Tell Dante he can sort out his own goddamn mess next time._ ”

By now, Paul has tired of his antics in the bathroom and has come to lean against Primo’s back, arms slung around his shoulders, and so he is there when Leonardo’s voice comes through low and clear:

“ _Your mother’s dead_.”

If Leo says anything else, Primo doesn’t hear it, only Paul saying softly, “Fuck, man… Hey, I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”


	19. Milan (the tenement)

Getting old has never been much of a concern for Primo, maybe because he’d decided early on it would never happen to him. Likelier than not, he will die in his prime or before he’s reached it, and if he doesn’t, he won’t let himself become his uncle, ponderously slow in his movements, quick to ineffectual anger, a wrinkled brown walnut of a man who’d crack under the right amount of vicious pressure. He’s never wanted to turn into Leonardo, either, letting part of himself go soft, soft-bodied and soft-spirited with the loss of his appetite for danger, that ever-present alertness that has only too often saved Primo’s life. And what other examples of old age does he know? The elders who gather around a table outside the village bar in summer, in the kitchen of Gio Bruno’s farm in the winter, men who have always talked of Calabria as if the land was one of their daughters whose honour they must protect at all costs? With their tales of a brotherhood of men rising up in arms after the north had failed to deliver on its promises of a unified country, as attached to their blood rituals, the supposedly centuries-old codes, as they are to their crumbling farmhouses, their morning card games, church services repeated so often they’ve become little more than a meaningless hum. Some of them were already hunched over and thoroughly wrinkled when Primo was still a boy, Gio Bruno whose grandfather had watched Garibaldi arrive from Sicily, who haunts the family farm like a grumpy household deity now that his granddaughters’ husbands have taken over; Silvio Aricò who lost his entire family in the Messina earthquake when he was a teenager, who continues to win at cards although he’s as good as blind now, recognizing them by touch because they have been using the same deck for half a century. These men have never given Primo any cause for envy.

He’s never envied Paul, either. Not at the start, when he thought Paul’s immaturity was wilful ignorance and a product of the world he lived in, nor as he grew to know him, far better than either of them could have predicted. Paul has always flaunted his youth, sometimes on purpose - in those early days when they didn’t know how to act around each other, trying on tricks to see if they would fit, shadow puppets and smiles and cigarettes, a repertoire that Paul has kept on refining since they met - and sometimes because he just can’t help it. He never looks so young as when he’s afraid; when Primo had found him in the factory after he’d got rid of Salvo Avretti, glassy-eyed and gritting his teeth, he could have believed they’d circled right back to 1973. Paul’s youth is a curse and something of a death wish, too, and maybe that’s the beginning and the end of it, not that one of them is closer to being old than the other (and even then, which one of them would that be), but rather that they have always been far closer to death than most people; and in the years that followed the kidnapping, this has made them careless in addition to being reckless: unwilling to confront head on the fact that they might die, even as they’re willing to chase the high of it in each other’s company.

Primo isn’t trying to prove a point, then, as he fucks Paul in the bathroom, Paul sitting on the sink with his knees up against his chest, Primo holding on tight to his hair, trousers caught around his knees, as if they’d stumbled back into their old patterns, rough, fast sex in the bathroom of some Roman club, it’s not about making him swallow back that joke (and Paul repeats it against his neck in a staggered exhale, “A mean... old bastard, that’s what you are, come on, _harder,_ ”) but it might be an attempt at distracting them both.

 _“Don’t make this into something it isn’t,”_ he tells Paul afterwards, as they sit in the empty bathtub. The dog has wandered in and curled up on the rug; his ears twitch in his sleep as Paul strokes his head.

“What are we talking about, the flat, your mother or the sex?” Paul asks. Primo has put his clothes back on, Paul hasn’t. He lets his head roll back against the edge of the tub and closes his eyes. “I’d be in a state if something happened to my mother. It’s alright if you’re…”

“I hadn’t seen my mother in twenty-five years.” The ashtray tilts sideways on Paul’s knee as Primo taps his cigarette against it. “I’m not... in a state.”

“Sure man. I just meant… It’s alright if you want to talk about it, you know?”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


As a child, Primo used to run messages between one of the Scopelliti in the village and his son who looked after their flock up on the mountain, in exchange for a coin apiece from the father, a cigarette from the son. He hoarded his coins and his cigarettes in a box he’d buried in the woods ahead of what he hoped might turn out to be some grand escape. Not to the city - at the time he was drawn to the mountains and the promise of a more remote valley on the other side of the steepest pass, where the air might be purer, clear of human voices, although when he finally made it, a few years later, it was to discover that men had preceded him there as they had everywhere else, building a small oratory in the heart of the valley where the forest met the churning river and the broken moraine of a dead glacier. Someone had been buried there, in the little stone chapel, and Primo had sat on the illegible tomb with his legs crossed, given some thought to never going back to the village, and decided it would destroy his mother as surely as if he’d shot her through the heart. He’d smoked his cigarettes and eaten what provisions he’d brought along, and before he went home, he buried his coins in a cache he never revisited afterwards.

By the time he began to turn his sights towards the cities, he’d lost all delusions of escape. And yet, his mother had made it out. 

All these years, he’d always thought that maybe she’d died on the very day she’d tried to flee, driving herself into a ravine, swimming away from the nearest shore and never turning back, because he used to think that’s what “leaving” meant. Family doesn’t stop because you move away, it doesn’t disappear, and after the men had stopped looking for her in the mountains and in the surrounding villages, in the weeks after she’d left, Salvatore had passed on word to their relatives in Rome, in Milan, in Naples. _There’s nowhere the bitch can run to that we won’t find her,_ he’d told Primo’s father, but the words had been aimed at Primo, too. He was expected to pick a side, and Salvatore’s squinty-eyed glare - Primo’s father’s fists on the table, heavy with unspent aggression since his wife had left - made it clear Primo better pick the right one.

The two of them never thought to ask him if he knew where she’d gone, but it’s not as if he could have told them. The one piece of information he had that they didn’t was several years old, dating back to that day in the mountains, when he’d seen her hands gripping the back of a man’s dark jacket, a startling glimpse of her pale knees on either side of the man’s waist. Primo hadn’t known who the man was at the time, he’d only figured it out weeks after the fact - a cobbler from the next village over, a widower, who’d gone grey in the face when Primo had stared at him in the street. Primo wouldn’t have told Salvatore or his father about the cobbler if they’d asked, but from the moment he’d found out about the man he’d resented his mother for not choosing someone with a better poker face, who wouldn’t let themselves be intimidated by the feral eyes of a twelve-year old child. 

Later on, he’d wondered if Salvatore might not have got to her, after all, and made sure word of it didn’t get out, but Salvatore had always been a poor hunter, and as a capo, he’d never been much good at exploiting the contacts he had beyond the confines of his own village. Primo wanted to believe his mother had outsmarted him, in death if not in life.

Maybe it’s a relief to have been right. It’s hard to tell, after all these years.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


“Giuseppina,” he says, after Paul has asked him for the second time. It’s the first time he hears her name spoken out loud in about as long as it’s been since she disappeared; after she’d run off, his father had taken to calling her _“that whore”_ and the village had followed suit.

(Most of the village. 

_“News from your mother?”_ Leonardo had tried, uncharacteristically awkward as he came to find Primo after church, Primo fourteen and belligerent, sucking on a split lip, glaring at Leonardo with his one good eye, the other swollen shut. Leonardo hadn’t asked what had happened to him. Maybe he’d seen Primo’s father during the office and his reddened knuckles; maybe he hadn’t needed to.

 _“Of course not,”_ Primo had snapped at him, furious that Leonardo had even dared to ask.)

“It’s a beautiful name,” Paul ventures, the sort of thing you say for lack of a more appropriate answer, except it’s Paul and he probably means it.

Since Leonardo’s phone call, Paul has been - not quite gentle, sensing perhaps that gentle wouldn’t cut it - but attentive. Cigarettes appear between Primo’s fingers before he’s done thinking he might want them, Paul suggests a walk that seems aimed at Primo as much as at the dog, and once they return from it, he procures them dinner from the trattoria on the ground floor, having somehow obtained that the cook fill up two plates and let him take them away to the second floor. 

“I’ll take them back down when we’re done,” he explains, “I said I’d lend a hand with the dishes,” a promise he forgets about as soon as he’s done eating his risotto. “We should just go dance,” he offers instead. “It’ll do you good, you’ll see. Take your mind off things.” 

For a while, everything is at it used to be, the two of them getting drunk off their heads at a club they used to know, Paul getting him off under the table, one hand shoved down the front of Primo’s trousers, Primo finding issue with some guy who’d looked at him sideways, unless he’s just spoiling for a fight. For some reason that might have to do with the amount of coke he’s snorted, Paul tries to step between them, and the night ends with Primo down on his knees in a sidestreet, as good an apology as Paul is ever going to get, who cranes his head back against cold stone so his nose won’t drip blood in Primo’s hair. The balance of the world intact for a second, away from the strange domesticity of the flat, the funeral in Milan the following day, about which Primo has yet to make up his mind ( _“If you go, it will send a message,_ ” Leonardo had warned him, right on the back of his condolences. _“They’ll say you’ve forgiven her”)._

When they return Paul is out in minutes, blood on the bed sheets and dishes in the sink, the clothes he’d worn earlier in the day strewn across the bathroom. Primo lets him sleep the night off - whistles for the dog and only stops a second at Paul’s side before he steps back outside, letting his fingers touch his red curls, the soft pressure of the gesture half-remembered.

 _My wild boy,_ she used to say.

  
  
  
  
  
  


_“This isn’t the service I thought you meant.”_ Like most people who’ve heard Primo joke before, Ada is reluctant to be amused. _Where is the ghastly punchline,_ her dark eyes seem to ask, even as she tucks a strand of Primo’s hair behind his ear, the gesture easy and familiar. _Who are we killing this time?_

_“I need him looked after for a day or two. Until I get back.”_

Primo’s list of contacts in Rome is a long one. Calling in favours is easy, much like he collects the _pizzo_ back home, like it’s his due and always has been, with retribution for those who refuse. This is different, this dog that knows instinctively when to leave him alone and when to fall in step with him, who might be able to fend for himself in the Aspromonte for a day or two, but who’ll be run over by a car the second Primo sets him loose in Rome. He wouldn’t trust any of the ‘ndrina’s men in Rome with it, but he would trust Ada, who’d once enabled his murder of Salvatore, who’s helped him out of a tight spot on several occasions in the years since, and who’s never been anything less than funny, regardless of the time of day and the amount of coke they’ve consumed. Lately she has settled down some, taking a job as a hostess at some upscale club, fetching the child she’d left with her grandparents back at the village to raise him on her own, but she’s still the same old Ada who’d kissed him for luck before she slammed the boot of her car shut over him, calling out, _“You’re lucky to be good-looking, you crazy fuck,”_ before she got behind the wheel and drove him to Salvatore’s farm.

Jojo waggles his tail expectantly when she gets down on one knee in front of him.

_“A day or two? What’s this, you decided you were feeling lonely, so you got yourself a dog? Primo. You could have called me.”_

They both know she doesn’t mean it, or means it because she knows Primo will never take her up on the offer. Somewhere upstairs Paul is waiting for him, getting started on that mural he’s decided to paint in the bedroom, ready to ruin the wrinkled white shirt he’d found at the bottom of his suitcase, _I’m not very good at funerals, man, I’ve never known how to look the part_ , with a candid smile as he lights himself a cigarette, barefoot in his black slacks, _It’s lucky I had to pack this for the festival, did you get me some yellow paint?_

 _“I did call you,”_ Primo points out, as he slips a stack of bills inside the pocket of her tawny jacket. _“Make sure he gets enough exercise. It’s a mountain dog.”_

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Paul is wearing dusty black oxfords and a black velvet jacket under his black coat; it’s as dressed up as he’s ever going to be without looking like he also fell face first in a tub full of glitter while trying to emulate the clash of colours and textures in one of those contemporary paintings he so admires. And yet. He was right - he doesn’t look the part. Nobody would mistake him for a mourner. A sometimes actor walking the red carpet at the Berlin film festival, maybe. Or a scion to billionaires on holiday in bustling Milan, a city that might outdo Rome when it comes to lavish parties and extravagantly dressed foreigners.

“ _It’s your hair_ ,” Primo reflects. Once a golden hippie…

He’s never met anyone else who stood out quite in the way that Paul does. Even here on the city’s most crowded piazza, among groups of tourists and balloon sellers and trenchcoated men on their lunch breaks, a few leftover fur coats from the winter, bell bottom trousers all around, people still glance at Paul as they pass him by.

 _”Have you seen enough?”_ Primo asks, as he lights himself a cigarette outside the cathedral, this detour a concession to Paul’s enthusiasm. _I’ve always wanted to go to Milan, man._

Already Primo can feel his calm slipping away from his grasp, something of the city getting under his skin, the grit and the exhaust fumes, the grease stains and discarded food wrappings and the yellow taxis lined up outside the Galleria. In this moment of not knowing exactly why he decided to come, Milan reminds him of New York.

 _“I like it, I think?_ I had this friend who used to live in Milan… Well, this guy I met at a party back in the day, he said if I came I should see the cathedral and the cemetery. I wrote it down because I thought it was a good way to sum up a city, you know?”

Primo thinks it’s a strange way to sum up a city like Milan, as opposed to his village, where life does revolve around the baroque church with its fresh coat of paint and a cemetery some fucking idiot decided to build on a hill right beneath the main road, so that the graves seem to rise up and out of the ground, a little higher with every passing year. But he isn’t about to argue with Paul - several times already he’s snapped at him and each time Paul lapses into a cautious, heartfelt sort of silence, looking at Primo like he expects him to fall apart. He’ll take Paul’s art lessons over his pity.

“Anyways it’s not as ugly as I heard it was, or it’s ugly in an interesting way, and I like how sharp the spires are.”

 _“I’m glad we stopped by long enough for you to decide the cathedral was_ ugly,” Primo says, but there’s no heat to it. He could have all the money in the world and it wouldn’t make him long for a building so full of spires any visiting angel would most likely impale itself on its way down. “They’ll bury me in the village.” Even as he says it he’s unsure what he wants Paul to do with this information, or even if he expects some kind of response. “That’s where she should have been buried as well.”

“In a place where she wasn’t happy?”

“What does it matter? She’s dead.”

Paul is giving him another of those sad, compassionate looks, so Primo turns away from him, hands fisted in the pockets of his jacket.

“Andiamo.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


The letter had not bothered with details: the bare fact of his mother’s death alongside a date and directions should he wish to attend the funeral. Primo has family in Milan like he has family in Rome, people who replicate on the scale of a building or street the sort of small-time, smalltown extortion that the Calabrian dons have perfected over the past century. If Primo decided to burn all his bridges, Milan would be the last place he’d run to. Even Rome had seemed preferable, back when he’d been trying to put some distance between himself and his uncle, carrying messages north like he used to carry them up the mountain, collecting Salvatore’s dues and driving back to Calabria with bags of cash in the boot of his car. Salvatore didn’t believe in wire transfers, he believed in a hole in the ground, and whether what you put in it was a body or a bag of _lire_ , you could rest assured it would stay put.

Standing in the courtyard of the little tenement building, where laundry lines sag down from the balconies as the wind tugs at clean bed sheets, plants wilting on the window sills, pale pink paint peeling back in patches from the walls, some of the shutters missing, some of them propped up in wait of unlikely repairs, electric wiring snaking above the doors and windows, bundles of it hanging heavy in wait of the spark that will reduce the whole building to ashes, Primo wonders why he ever thought bringing Paul along would be a good idea. The building isn’t any drabber or sinister or more destitute than any other place he’s taken him to in the past seven years. Until the previous day he didn’t even know this place existed. But Primo knows buildings like this one. He’d even lived in them, back when he used to spend as much time in Rome as he did back home. Always with Paul he ends up letting pieces of himself tumble out of his hands for Paul to catch or drop and gawp at, like he’s gawping now, taking in the scene like he wants to paint it, arms full of the ridiculous flowers he’d insisted on buying after he’d had Primo explain to him “how Italian funerals worked”. 

“But you just said we can’t show up empty-handed,” he’d protested.

_“I don’t know these people. I’m not bringing them flowers.”_

Paul had shrugged, _“Then I will,”_ and he’d procured a bouquet of carnations at the first flower shop they’d driven past in Milan.

The woman who answers the door seems quite taken with Paul’s flowers, and with Paul himself, ushering him in ahead of Primo and kissing him on both cheeks.

 _“I’m sorry for your loss,”_ Paul offers, in his usual ramshackle Italian. His accent is a source of further delight.

 _“I’m Roberta, an old friend of Giuseppina. You should eat.”_ The suggestion is phrased like an order and she fast appropriates another guest’s arm, entrusting Paul to them.

There are more people in the small apartment than Primo would have thought. If his mother has lived her life half on the run, he’d have expected a handful of acquaintances at most, but there are at least twenty people in the small living-room alone, presumably several more in the kitchen.

 _“Neighbours, mostly,”_ Roberta informs him, as she sets Paul’s flowers down on a plywood cabinet. “ _You must be Primo.”_

If she’d thought of kissing him in turn, Primo’s cool glare has her revise this decision. She reaches up to tap his shoulder instead.

_“She’d told me she’d had a son. I wasn’t sure what to call him, she said. But that you decided to make it a challenge, to find some way to be ahead of everybody else. You look like you could use some food, too.”_

Roberta doesn’t quite reach his shoulder, but she won’t let that deter her.

_“Make yourself at home, and your friend too. I know she was hoping you’d come.”_

_“You said you were an old friend.”_

_“Yes, we knew each other in Rome.”_

For a moment, Primo just stares at her, as the map of his mother’s life redefines itself and he considers the points where they might have crossed paths, knowingly or not.

She must have known what he’d turn into. If she’d wanted him to become anything else, she should have offered him a ride out of Calabria, and even if she had… He wouldn’t have accepted it. Better the faint outline of a criminal empire, blazing across his mind as his father’s belt caught him in the teeth.

 _“In Rome?”_ he echoes.

 _“We were secretaries in the same travel agency. We kept in touch, and I’d promised her I’d… take care of things, if anything happened to her. I’m from Catanzaro,”_ Roberta adds, as if that explains it all. Maybe it does. The dark look she’s giving him now is all too knowing. _I know what you are._ _“I haven’t gone back there in decades and I don’t intend to. She wanted you here, so I wrote to you. I loved her enough for that. We used to go dancing after work, hold on to each other in the street when we were too drunk to stand. She’d do my make-up in the morning, brewed us coffee before we went to open the agency. Here, give me your coat.”_

Primo waves her off, the gesture brisker than he’d meant it to be.

_“How did she die?”_

_“Heart attack,”_ Roberta answers, a steely gleam in her eye. Primo doesn’t get much else out of her, and doesn’t try to, but some of it he’ll infer from the cemetery of empty bottles in the tiny pantry, the sparsity of furniture and personal belongings that isn’t without reminding him of his own house, the fact that most of the people present are indeed neighbours. The two people who intercept him to tell him that he looks _“just like her”_ are then unable to come up with much in the way of details, _“She kept to herself, but she was lovely,” ”We didn’t see each other often but she’ll be missed, she was a good listener, the life of the party.”_

In many ways, it would appear his mother had never stopped running once she’d put the village behind her, until she could run no longer.

Paul finds him in the bedroom, smoking by the open window, holding the black leatherbound bible he’d found on his mother’s nightstand.

“Hey.” Paul darts in for a kiss before he swipes Primo’s cigarette, his mouth tasting of the wine he drank in the kitchen. Primo grasps a fistful of his hair and pulls him in for another kiss, chasing the wine on his lips and tongue. By the time he draws back, Paul is glassy-eyed and dishevelled, the cigarette burnt down almost to a stub. Palm flat against Primo’s chest, over the faint outline of a small vial of coke. For a second, Primo thinks Paul is about to reach in, tip some of it onto the back of his hand for Primo to snort. It wouldn’t be the first time. Instead, Paul takes a drag of the cigarette before he leans in again, and slowly blows the smoke past Primo’s lips.

“When I was a boy…” Primo looks away from Paul’s earnest gaze. “There was a woman in the village who went with another man. She died not long after that. _They found her strung up in a tree, in her father’s olive grove._ People said she did it because she was ashamed. _When that kind of thing happens though, you just have to listen to the women. Isn’t that what you always say? The women told another story. They said her father did it himself, because her husband didn’t have the guts._ ” He snatches the cigarette from Paul’s fingers and puts it out on the window sill. _“My mother eloped at sixteen, to marry my father. No fucking idea what she was doing._ ” His eyes cut to Paul. _“Who does, at sixteen? She had me at seventeen._ I knew she was fucking another man. Maybe she knew they would kill her when they found out.” 

Life or death, and a child in between.

“How old were you, when she left?” Paul asks.

Primo lets the bible fall open in his hand, to a page marked by a dog-eared picture of an angry reed of a boy, staring bright blue daggers at the camera.

_“Thirteen.”_

Too young to go after her, at the time. Yet in the following year, he’d learned to drive, he’d gone down on his knees for the sharp-faced boy who sold oranges at the market, whose hand his father would break in retaliation - and on his uncle’s orders, he’d killed a man.

“Can I keep it?”

Primo doesn’t hold the bible out of Paul’s reach, although he’s tempted to do so. Instead, he watches him secure the picture inside his passport and the passport inside his velvet jacket, taking one more piece of Primo away with him. This one, though... Primo is almost glad to see it go. 

He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with it, anyways, and there’s still that chain around his neck, the St Christopher his mother had left behind. It hadn’t been a gift either. He’d found it on her side of the marital bed, lodged in a gap between two floorboards. This he could tell those friends of hers who struggled to define her, that there’d always been something forgetful about Giuseppina, who could never sing a song without skipping half the verses, who’d get lost on the hillsides behind the house, who could be loving one minute, and gone the next.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Primo kisses her before they close the casket. It is the custom, after all; he’d also kissed his father’s sagging cheek on the day they buried him, although at the time the room had been full of people waiting to see what he would do. Paul and Roberta have left him alone and the rest of Giuseppina’s neighbours and acquaintances are waiting inside the church. Nobody would have known if he’d just glanced into the casket at a face he no longer remembered and then left. As it is, he watches her for a while, so much smaller than she used to be, before he leans in and kisses her high forehead, stroking his thumb along the hair at her temple, black streaked with silver. He’d stopped loving her and resenting her a long time ago. Whatever is left, it isn’t sentiment, or relief, or longing. Only the answer to a question he’d had in the back of his mind for almost thirty years now, dissatisfying as such answers are often bound to be.

The church is small, the young priest, harried. It’s neither the first nor the last funeral he will be presiding over today, and whether he’s still caught up in the previous one or looking ahead to the next, he doesn’t seem entirely focused on the task at hand. Primo accepts his limp handshake with a dead-eyed smile, and walks away when the man asks if he’ll _“say a few words”_ during the ceremony. The church is mostly empty: few of the neighbours that Primo had seen at his mother’s apartment have seen fit to attend the service. Leonardo’s presence at Paul’s side in the nave isn’t exactly a surprise (the surprise, maybe, would have been if he’d decided not to come).

 _“We’ll have to talk about this,”_ Leonardo mutters, eyes darting towards Paul who continues to stand out, tall and pale and bright-haired, a more arresting sight than the colourful statues on the walls. 

_Black suits him_ , Primo thinks.

_“After my mother’s funeral, maybe.”_

Leonardo frowns, but doesn’t press the issue. In the end it’s Primo who revives the conversation, somewhere between the priest’s tepid gospel reading and his uninspired homily, after Roberta and a blustering neighbour have delivered their eulogies, the former celebrating Giuseppina’s _“strength of character”_ and _“appetite for life”,_ the second spending far too long on an anecdote about a parmigiana recipe.

 _“When I die, let the boy mourn me,”_ he says, letting the dialect tumble off his tongue, too low and too fast for Paul to overhear.

Leonardo crosses himself, cursing under his breath, a first time and a second when he realises he’s doing it.

 _“I’ll die before you, you idiot,”_ he whispers back, but he grips Primo’s arm, a familiar signal by now, whether they’re attending a meeting with a rival ‘ndrina or contemplating the bodies of men they’d thought until a few minutes prior that they might be able to bribe. _I’ll take care of it._

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Primo agrees to join the pallbearers in no small part because there wouldn’t be enough men if he didn’t, joining the husband of the woman who’d eulogised about Giuseppina’s parmigiana and his teenage son, Leonardo taking position across from him. There isn’t much to carrying a coffin, one of those things he’d learned growing up, like shooting deer or slaughtering lambs or driving on a potholed road around a hairpin bend, like his prayers and the first acrid swig of wine and the back of his father’s hand: it’s about distributing his weight, learning to stomach it, remembering through it all (a steadying rhythm) that he’s alive, alive, alive, and not yet buried, not yet dead and gone.


	20. Milan (the Monumentale)

It’s not the cemetery Paul wanted to see. 

They put Primo’s mother in the ground, the crowd even thinner than it had been at the church, and they’re on their way back to the cars, Leonardo briskly smoking, Paul holding on to Primo’s arm as if he’d maybe read in a magazine that this was appropriate mourning behaviour, when Paul remarks, “I thought it’d look grander. I’d heard there were all sorts of crazy mausoleums…”

“You’re thinking of the Monumentale,” Leonardo says. “Not the same cemetery.”

“Oh. Well, that’s okay I guess. I can visit it another time.”

It feels about as good as shaking a weight off his shoulders - putting that coffin down - when Primo decides, _“You go ahead, Leo. Go back to the apartment, if anything needs to be sorted out… Gravestones or god knows what, take care of it. I’ll meet you later. Outside those shops we bought out on the via Sismondi.”_

“Primo,” Leonardo sighs. A warning.

“Fuck off, Leo.”

There’s nothing for him back in that apartment. Only his mother’s empty bottles, leftovers from the neighbours earlier culinary contributions, and a worn-out bible on a dusty nightstand. Whatever he owed his mother and the boy who’d once missed her like the light in winter, the debt has been paid.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Yews and spruce rising like monuments themselves among the graves, the few passers-by less tangible than the stone statues of angels and mourners, tombstones as pedestals for the busts set above them. A man in a bowtie holds a cigar between his marble lips, a girl lies across a slab of granite with her arms extended, all of them self-absorbed, statues engaged in prayer or in conversation, green bronze and the white folds of an angel tunic, pyramids and small temples and the heavy ironwork of crosses covered in sculpted foliage. The sky is clear above the Monumentale, as if away from the pollution of Milanese streets the cemetery has a climate of its own. Paul wanders among the graves exclaiming at this sculptor’s prowess, that family’s astonishing belief in its own immortality, that it would order a life-sized, bronze version of the Last Supper to signal the place of their final repose - or a choir of stone cherubs bearing lutes, or a depiction of a winged and bearded angel of death sprawled upon their tomb, scythe in hand.

“My grandfather would have liked that one,” Paul muses, hands in the pockets of his black coat. With his dark sunglasses and the black silk scarf around his neck, which he must have borrowed or stolen from someone in Berlin, he looks every inch the movie star. “Or maybe he wouldn’t have? He’s buried in California, in his museum. Or, you know. Not in the museum. On the grounds. It’s an ugly grave. I haven’t gone to see it, I didn’t go to the funeral either, but Aileen told me about it. I think if you’re into art and you have money, the least you can do is get yourself a good-looking grave.”

He lowers his sunglasses.

“You’re supposed to ask me what kind of grave I’d want. If I died.”

“You think about death too much.”

“Don’t you? I think I’d like to be cremated, actually. Maybe you can scatter my ashes in Calabria. Somewhere in the mountains, somewhere with trees. I think it’s that way.”

“What?”

“There’s this statue I want us to see.”

Primo isn’t sure how one statue could stand out among this crowd of stone-faced vigils, but he follows Paul between the trees and into another section of the cemetery.

“I asked the guy at the entrance where it was,” Paul explains. “Actually, I knew a girl who was going to do an art project with her mother’s ashes, but I think she got in trouble, legally I mean. I get the appeal, though. Of… becoming art, you know? Ah, I think it’s over there.”

 _You’re already art,_ Primo thinks, lighting himself a cigarette, but Paul is in one of these moods where he doesn’t really expect Primo to react to any of his bizarre tangents.

“Art is kind of… drawn to death, right? I think my stepmother was. Drawn to death, I mean. I don’t think I told you about that. She, uh… _She died when I was fourteen. Of an overdose. And my father was just… I tried to…_ ” He presses his hands against an invisible ribcage. ”I was on drugs too. The Stones came to stay with us for a week... Everyone was high. I don’t know, I think I loved her, but like I love paintings… I don’t think I knew her, really. I think you’re the first person that I’ve… Here it is.”

The statue is partly shielded from the towering neoclassical monuments around it by panels of rough concrete. A sculpture without a head or arms or legs, the clay folds of its blue tunic lifting in an imaginary wind.

“It’s a Fontana, like the painting you got me. I think it’s supposed to represent the soul when it leaves the body. It’s crazy how he manages to make the clay look light, right? It feels like you could just embrace it and the folds of the skirt would flap against your legs. I like the golden wings too, how it’s just… daring to be colourful.” 

The sculpture’s trim figure reminds Primo all too well of his mother’s body as it lay inside the casket. It had seemed impossible she might once have brought him into the world, slender as she was.

“What do you think?” Paul asks.

 _“That you always talk about statues or paintings like you want to fuck them.”_ Primo blows a whiff of pale smoke at the statue. _“I’d get you a pair of golden wings, if I could.”_

 _“Not those,”_ Paul warns him, slipping his arm under Primo’s. _“Hey... Thank you, man. For bringing me here.”_

Primo dismisses his gratitude with a careless hand wave.

_“I’m dropping you off at a hotel. Then I’m meeting up with Leonardo. I need to talk to a few people, to try and sort out a new line of distribution through Milan.”_

Paul nods slowly, taking in the information as well as the fact that Primo decided to share it. He doesn’t tell Primo to come back alive, although he does tug him closer by the lapels of his coat, briefly pressing his mouth against his, and before he pulls away, he adds in a hot whisper against Primo’s ear, “Fuck me later.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


It rains that evening, which feels like the logical conclusion to the day’s events. One of those quick, heavy Italian showers punctuated with impatient cracks of thunder that will be gone within the hour.

Paul lies on the hotel bed with the shutters open, listening to the water in the gutters and the sounds of the city outside, while he sketches rooftops and church spires. The air feels clear and fresh, as if it sensed what was needed after a funeral. Every so often he pauses to unfold the photograph of Primo that he took from Giuseppina’s bible, like he has to check he actually has it, that moment of having received it still seeming quite unreal.

He presses his mouth to the picture and wonders briefly if Primo’s mother ever did the same. He thinks of that time, a few months ago in the kitchen in Calabria, how he had surged forward and kissed every inch of Primo’s face before Primo could stop him, and he figures maybe Primo doesn’t care to be kissed most times, but he hopes he has felt them, all these years, both Paul’s kisses and his mother’s, however distant.

Maybe he’s being too kind to Primo’s mother. Giving her the benefit of the doubt, presuming that she’d still cherished her whirlwind son, that she must have had her reasons for leaving him in a place like that. Maybe Paul is kind to Giuseppina because to condemn her actions would be to condemn his own.

He thinks about phoning his son, but he doesn’t know the number. What would he say anyway?

There had been a conversation with his uncle Gordon once, shortly before Paul’s wedding (Gordon who has always been kind, if perhaps a little sanctimonious, but then maybe that’s what you get from singing choral music all day), where Paul had said he just wanted to do what was best for the kid. _Give him or her what I didn’t have._ Whatever he’d meant by that at the time – stable parents, sober parents, a sense of belonging in one place – he is quite confident he has not provided on any front.

Primo must know that about him. Paul wonders what he makes of it.

He puts aside the churches and chimneys and sketches Primo instead. Not the man he knows but the boy in the photograph, with his hot-tempered stare and his long limbs that he was clearly far from growing into. Paul can relate. He draws himself beside him. How old had Primo said he’d been then, twelve, thirteen? Paul had been trailing around after his father and Talitha at that age, learning how to cut coke and roll his own cigarettes, how to smile at people twice his age until they gave him what he wanted. In the picture, Primo’s sleeves are too short for his long arms, an unflattering 1950s shirt that makes him look half like a schoolboy, half like a wartime refugee. Paul draws him in his own teenage wardrobe instead - ripped tie-dye t-shirts and bell-bottom jeans. He wonders if they would have been friends. Probably not, but maybe they could have forged something tentative over shared cigarettes, bumps of coke and deadbeat fathers, like they did a long time ago in the Calabrian countryside.

He sighs and flips his sketchbook closed. No, the nature of this relationship has always been that they are forced to dwell in the present. The past casts a long shadow, and it feels sometimes like they are always running - city to city, bedroom to bedroom - just to keep ahead of it. There is no reminiscing to be had between them. _Remember that time you were going to set me on fire? Remember smacking me, jabbing a gun in my face?_ Paul flops back against the pillows, tugging at his hair.

 _Remember when you saved my life?_

_Which time?_

_Every time. Even now, I think I’m only still walking around and breathing in and out because I know you’re there._

But as Primo himself has made clear often enough, there is no future tense either. No going to Marrakesh. So – what? Paul will go back to the flat in Rome, finish the last of the coffee they bought, paint the rest of the mural. Sunflowers, a whole field of them across the bedroom wall, and Primo had rolled his eyes at that. As close to reminiscing as they’ll ever get.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Primo gets back shortly before midnight and seems somewhat surprised to see Paul sitting on the bed, scribbling down ideas for a movie script, as if he had expected to find him gone. Perhaps on any other occasion, Paul might have wandered off, bought some more flowers or strolled along the navigli and sketched the canal boats, losing track of time as he so often does when he’s alone. But all evening he has felt the weight of Primo’s arm in his as they’d walked out of the cemetery, and it seemed wrong to drift away from that and leave Primo on his own, in this city so unfamiliar to the both of them.

“How did it go with Leonardo?”

Primo makes some noncommittal sound, slinging his coat down on the back of a chair and disappearing into the bathroom. Paul shuffles off the bed, finds him leaning on the sink snorting a pinch of coke, and cocks his head in expectation of being offered the same. Primo obliges, slumping slightly against Paul’s shoulder as Paul leans in to take the coke from his finger, and kisses him roughly.

Funerals and sex always seem to go together, Paul thinks, while he’s braced against the sink, one of Primo’s hands fisted in his hair and the other gripping his hip tightly. He remembers the rather performative sounds of his grandfather fucking one of his mistresses the night after they buried Uncle George, and the sight of Victoria’s long pale legs dangling over his father’s desk at their house in Morocco not long after saying goodbye to Talitha. He doesn’t resent her for that, doesn’t resent any of them. _In the midst of life we are in death…_ Well, so the opposite seems true. Like people need a reminder they’re alive, and not alone.

Afterwards, Primo rests his forehead against the top of Paul’s spine, muttering something in his tumbling Calabrian dialect between heavy breaths. Paul puts his hand over Primo’s where it’s still lingering against his side. His skin is still slightly cold from being outside, and Paul tries to warm it, running his fingers over the familiar plains, his wide thumb, the little mountain range of his knuckles, the unyielding bulk of his uncle’s ring.

Primo knocks his hand away, and Paul says, “You could stand to let someone be a little…I don’t know, tender with you sometimes.”

“ _And that’s you, is it?_ ”

“Well, yeah, I guess. Unless you’re seeing other people I don’t know about.”

He means it as a joke, but Primo looks at him gravely in the bathroom mirror.

“No, man, it’s cool, you can see whoever. None of my business, I get it.”

“I don’t,” he says, busy pulling up his trousers and fishing his lighter and a crushed pack of Marlboros out of the pocket. “See whoever.”

“Oh.”

_“But you do.”_

“I mean, no, not really. Just like, you know…” Paul perches on the edge of the sink, chewing on his lip. “Obviously there’s Martine, but like, I don’t even _see_ see her much these days. _You really don’t see anybody else?”_

_“When, eh? Between you and the business, and your damn dog, when do I have time for mistresses?”_

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


They retreat to bed, half undressed, not bothering to get under the covers, just buried in one another. It reminds Paul of the way Primo had crashed and all but passed out that first night at the hunting cabin, too tired to care that he fell asleep with his face in Paul’s hair, and he thinks perhaps it’s not so different – the kind of bone deep exhaustion that comes with grief. Paul has seen Primo _unhappy_ before, the kind of thing that usually translates into gunshots and dead bodies, the waft of smoke in the air, but this is different. Like all the fight has gone out of him. He knows Primo loved his mother – or he had once. He’s always worn her necklace. But maybe that’s the real grief, accepting that he had stopped loving her a long time ago. How draining to mourn a stranger. How tiresome to still be dealing with one’s parents at that age.

He strokes Primo’s moustache with his thumb. “You should try and sleep a little. Funerals are heavy, you know?” He has noted from the start how Primo’s bloodshot gaze keeps snapping to the door or the window. He couldn’t say for sure what sort of danger they might be in here, but he understands enough, Milan has its underbelly just like Rome. _“I can stay up, keep an eye on things. If that helps.”_

Primo looks wearily amused. _“You’re going to stand guard for me, Getty? You want my gun as well?”_

“No, no way.”

 _“You’ll just charm your way through any intrusion, no doubt.”_ He exhales loudly and turns his face into the pillow, his voice coming out muffled. _“Probably for the best. You’d most likely shoot your own dick off by mistake.”_

“Jeez, just go to sleep, old man. _I’ll wake you if anything happens_ ,” Paul says, knowing full well that Primo always sleeps with one ear open.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Primo does end up waking him, some hours later, to the sound of footsteps in the hotel hallway, elongated shadows slipping through the crack between the carpet and the door. Paul holds his breath, his eyes adjusting in the dark, glimpsing a glint of metal as Primo retrieves his pistol from beneath the pillow. They wait. The shadows pace back and forth, and then retreat, back along the corridor.

“It was probably nothing. Just hotel staff or something,” Paul says, but they don’t stay, slipping out through a back entrance while the city is still streetlamp lit, the sky so dark it feels as if they have been tossed into the bottom of a bag. Or the trunk of a car.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


(“What happened to the Alfetta?” Paul had asked, back in Rome before they’d set out.

Primo shrugged, throwing his bag into the backseat of some monstrous razor of a vehicle.

“Is this a Ferrari?”

_“Are you saying that because it’s the only Italian car you know?”_

“No.” Paul pouted at him as he ducked into the passenger seat. “My grandad had one. I’m guessing you won’t let me drive it either.”

“Non capisco. My English.”

“Asshole. I liked the Alfetta.”

 _“I know. I got rid of it to upset Paol specifically.”_ )

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


“What about Leonardo?” Paul wonders, as they’re heading out of the city towards a grey sunrise, clouded sky and concrete.

_“He left last night. It’s a long drive.”_

“He’s _driving_? From Milan to Calabria – Jesus, what is that, like, ten hours?”

Primo hums softly, a sound that could be agreement, or perhaps a laugh. “ _There’s a lot to do back home. Good to get a head start.”_

“Does this mean you’re heading back too then? _Back to Calabria?”_

Primo rubs his eyes and blinks at the monotonous stretch of highway ahead. _“I’ll drop you off in Rome.”_

“Stay the night?”

“What did I say, eh? Busy.” He sniffs loudly, the remains of another pinch of coke they’d shared in the freezing parking lot beforehand. Then, perhaps because it amuses him, he adds, _“There’s a wedding to arrange. Dante’s getting married.”_

Paul makes a face, remembering the man who used to chew his cigarettes down to a greasy pulp. “Good for him?” Not so much for her.

_“Good for him to learn his lesson. That’s what you get for knocking up farm girls.”_

  
  
  
  
  
  


Primo doesn’t stay the night, in the end, but after six hours from Milan to Rome (and Paul was right, he hadn’t let him drive that awful car), or perhaps just the last twenty-four hours taken as one weary sum, he submits to being pulled into the apartment and held against the bed and kissed anywhere that Paul can reach.

“You ever think about it?” Paul says quietly, later, when they’re smoking under an unfinished field of sunflowers. “Getting married?”

Primo snorts, pinches the cigarette from Paul’s long fingers.

“What, is it that crazy of a question? I’m just surprised nobody like, expects it of you.”

 _“No.”_ A word like a key turning a lock shut.

“Well, fine. Okay.” Paul lies down next to him properly, slings an arm over his chest.

_“In this life, a man can’t afford to make promises he knows he can’t keep. Leave that to priests and politicians.”_

“Hm.” Paul sighs against his shoulder. “And if I asked you to meet me here again, after Dante’s wedding – could you promise me that?”

Primo blows smoke from the corner of his crooked mouth. _“A deal, then.”_

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Paul sleeps for an hour or so and wakes up expecting to find Primo gone already, although when he leans out of the window, he spots him at one of the trattoria tables in the street below. He is sitting with a tall, dark-eyed woman, while Jojo sprawls at their feet, the dog rolling onto his back whenever the woman bends down to pet him.

“Ada,” she introduces herself, when Paul emerges with his sleepy eyes and wrinkled shirt. _“You must be the owner of this beast.”_

_“Are you talking about Primo or the dog?”_

Ada laughs. _“Oh, I like him.”_

 _“Keep him then,”_ Primo mutters, tossing a few crumpled notes on the table as he gets to his feet. “ _The boy, not the dog.”_ He gives a sharp whistle and Jojo leaps to his feet, butting his snout against Primo’s legs.

“You’re leaving?”

_“It’s a long drive.”_

“Okay, well – hold on a minute.” Paul hunts around in his jeans until he finds a pen, and then grabs Primo’s hand, scribbling on the back of it the number for his mother’s apartment in San Francisco. “I don’t really know where I’m headed after this, but if you need to find me, someone there will probably know. Just…don’t be weird.”

It’s never occurred to Paul until now whether his mother would recognise Primo if she saw him, or heard him for that matter. She didn’t speak about it much, her interactions with the Calabrians. Reminiscing is off limits to all of them, it seems. But from what Paul knows of the way Primo does business, he likes to handle things himself. Maybe she would know him; Paul has to hope not. He’s not sure she would be able to forgive that.

Primo glances at the writing on his hand, his face about as readable as Paul’s unruly scrawl. Then he works his uncle’s ring off his finger and presses it into Paul’s grasp.


	21. Trastevere

There are few places in the past ten years that Paul didn’t conceive of as a temporary stop on his way to somewhere else. For a long time, that “somewhere” was Morocco, although he’s ready to admit now that it wasn’t so much the place that he missed and idealised as the time he’d spent there, dizzy with sunlight and drugs, his affection for Talitha an enduring ache, a feverish stumble each time she snatched his fingers, playful, and kissed the back of his hand, half a girl still when he was still mostly a boy. After she died he thought her spirit must linger there, dancing barefoot around green courtyards, lingering open-mouthed under the arched tap of a fountain. Waiting for his father to come back - and if John Paul II wouldn’t, then maybe she’d agree to haunt Paul instead.

Rome isn’t Morocco, although it is, also, a dream of wilder times, of being in love with Martine, with Primo, with the marble shoulders of every statue he came across and the fixed stare of every religious painting that had ever watched over his sleep, one high following the next, parties and photoshoots, protests by the far-left or the far-right or both, he couldn’t tell, caught in the middle of a cloud of acrid smoke, until he woke up in someone else’s bathtub with a crown of silver-sprayed laurels on his head, t-shirt stained with whatever he’d drank and retched in the night.

Rome isn’t Morocco but it might just be “somewhere”, he decides. A place worth staying. After Primo has left he makes several plans to take off and then shelves them, one after the other, as he paints the table and chairs in the kitchen bright red, as he befriends the owner of the trattoria on the ground floor and the mother of three with the absentee husband living across the landing. He keeps touching Primo’s ring without thinking, spinning it around his finger as he poses for a painter or lets a filmmaker cry on his shoulder at a party or takes an American heiress on a tour of every Caravaggio painting in town, church after church after church, until they both smell of incense and the baroque nerve of the architecture seems to bleed into the landscape, a transferral of grey green hues and of the delicate marble capitals and friezes to the cloud formations in the pale March sky. Paul visits his old friend Nicolò, whom he’d met in a party back in the day, and listens to him lament the fact that nobody wants to buy his black and white pictures of Roman buildings. _Nobody that counts,_ Nicolò clarifies, since tourists lap it up, like Paul laps up the wine Nicolò pours him until he’s drunk enough to pick up the cleaning brush Nicolò uses to dust his worktops and paint over some of Nicolò’s pictures in broad blue strokes, trying to bring some life to them, or if not life, “Some sort of presence, man, these are all dead and you keep closing up the space, framing them like you want to trap something in. The paint, it won’t give them depth, but it’ll make them interesting. They become pictures, yeah? Instead of trying to be architecture. I think that’s the problem with photography, it tries to be real when it should just embrace the fact that it’s bidimensional. Painters understood that a while ago.” 

_“You’re a strange boy,”_ Nicolò informs him, in keeping with the way Paul’s friends and acquaintances in Rome treat him and have always treated him, as if he hadn’t grown up at all in the past decade.

Emboldened by his experiment with Nicolò’s pictures, Paul borrows a camera from him, trading it for a kiss that bores him halfway to sleep. He spends a day or two taking pictures of buildings and ruins he personally thinks are far better than Nicolò’s, and makes use of Nicolò’s darkroom to develop them. Then he prints one of them on sheets of paper tall enough to cover a whole wall of the living-room at the apartment, the deceptive regularity of the Colosseum’s arches, which he then touches up with his vivid blue paint. 

Once he’s done he buys more coffee. He sells Nicolò’s camera and decorates the apartment with rugs and fills the empty shelves with books he’ll never read. With what’s left he acquires a radio, second hand and temperamental. He has little choice but to let it play whatever it wants, and so he lies on the living-room carpet under the blue-tinged arches of the Colosseum as the sun sets on Rome and the radio switches at random from Fleetwood Mac to a Catholic mass. 

He doesn’t leave.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


One afternoon he reunites with Marcello in Ostia, and at the end of it he sends his son a letter, drawing the vegetal frieze of a mosaic for him, writing not, _I hope I’ll take you here someday_ but, _I hope you’ll come and visit soon_ , as if with this vain wish, he might reconcile the irreconcilable parts of his life. The letter will be of little consolation to his son, he suspects, who hasn’t seen him in weeks, so he devises other ways to stay in touch, with Balthazar as well as his mother and Martine.

“You didn’t run into any commotion on the way here, did you?” Irene asks, as she ushers him into her garden. “They shot a judge only a few streets away, on his way to the tribunal. The gunman just jumped on the bus and...” She fires an imaginary gun, the clumsiness of the gesture a clear sign that she’s never seen a gun, let alone held one. “Communism! It’s a disease masquerading as a cure. If you ask me, this country has been on the brink of explosion for far too long.”

Paul nods with as much of a neutral expression as he can manage. Two days ago, he’d fallen in step with a dozen university students protesting terrorism of all persuasions, mostly because he hadn’t sold the camera yet and he’d thought it would make for a series of interesting portraits. At heart he remains a dreamer and a Getty, political matters gliding over him unless they’re posing a direct threat to his way of life.

“You would think we’d be safe around here,” Irene muses, with a sideways glance at the murmuring marble fountain in the hallway of the villa her husband and her have been renting for the past five years.

“Yeah, the world is crazy right now,” Paul agrees, who’s never been so at peace than in the past two weeks, waiting in a Roman apartment that he painted himself for his lover to take a break from his cocaine business. “I get you. Everything is just… so difficult.”

Irene is his mother’s friend rather than his own. Paul behaves around her the way he does around older people, sometimes, anticipating the responses they want from him, moulding himself into whatever it is that they want to see in order to get what support they can give him. Irene’s latest guise is that of a poet and patron of the arts; before that, she’d played the role of an oil man’s wife, a familiar fixture at those parties where Paul used to accompany his mother while his father smoked his fiftieth cigarette of the day and stared at production curves. 

“Here,” Irene says, setting a slender hand veined with blue atop a marble countertop veined with black, fingers lightly tapping against the phone. “Give your mother my best if you manage to get a hold of her. Do join me in the library for a drink afterwards.”

Paul gives her one of his sad, charming smiles and dials Martine’s number.

On the phone Balthazar is more assertive than he would be face to face, interrupting Paul in the middle of an anecdote about tourists getting attacked by pigeons in the forum to ask, “When are you coming back?”

“I don’t know,” Paul says, because if he is to fail at every other parental duty, he’s resolved not to lie to his son. “I miss you.” This isn’t a lie, either; rather a truth he doesn’t want to confront too often. 

“I made a movie,” Balthazar informs him.

“You did? Tell me about it.”

Paul winds the cord around his finger as Balthazar launches into an excited account of the day Martine took him to hang around the set of a friend’s science-fiction movie. Once he’s run out of monsters to name, Martine returns to the phone.

“You sound like you’re doing better,” she remarks.

“Better compared to what?” Paul asks, his eyes on the painting hung up right in front of him, a quiet little memento mori, probably Flemish, probably worth a lot of money.

“Berlin. Jutta said you were… adrift. That maybe I should come and get you.”

“Jutta said that?”

He can perfectly picture the tenseness of Martine’s smile as she answers, “Not in so many words, but it was implied. Are you… Should I…”

“Don’t worry. I’m fine. Taking pictures, walking around. Marcello says hi. He’s designing ads for an airline these days, you wouldn’t recognise him. He’s trying to grow a beard.”

Like most paintings of its kind, the memento mori on the wall is full of details, various objects scattered around a tired human skull, the bone gone brown with age, shiny with the polish of one too many rags and one too many hands. A purse spills out burnished coins, an iridescent shell leans against an open book that might have been dunked in a river before someone set it down on the worn wood of the table. Behind it a fat white candle in a pewter holder has burnt down almost to a stub. Even after centuries, the colours blurring into brown as the varnish aged, the wax of the candle still glistens, pure white.

Memento moris have always only had one meaning. _Remember that you’re going to die._

“I’m staying with Erik and Svenja until the end of the month, but if you’re back after that, we could come and see you,” Martine offers, and adds, with gentle insistence, “We’ll figure things out, Paol.” 

Paul isn’t sure if she means their relationship or their son’s upbringing or the mad rhythms of their respective lives. 

“When you come back,” she concludes.

Paul twists the ring around his finger. It’s an ugly, bulky thing; he wouldn’t wear it if it hadn’t come from Primo. As it is, he hasn’t taken it off for a second since he first slid it onto the ring finger of his right hand. Primo used to wear it on his little finger, but then Primo has bigger hands. What Paul wants to say, rather dramatically, is _But_ _I never came back, did I?_

“Okay,” he says instead.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Paul doesn’t try to contact Primo in the week that follows Milan, waiting for the steady murmur of his absence (the clothes he left in the bedroom, his cigarette ends in a coffee cup, the fine white hair caught in the threads of the blanket on which Jojo had slept) to build up until it becomes impossible to ignore. Eventually he’ll try to call, or maybe he’ll send him another letter.

 _Dear Primo, still in Rome._ He does draft it, in fragments in the margins of his notebook, in between notes for a short film and sketches of grumpy mascarons. _Yesterday I wore the jeans you left behind and snuck into the Farnese to kiss a statue with a beautiful mouth the way I’d like to kiss you, longer than you usually let me, until I’m gasping for breath and ready to beg for your hands on me. I’m just being a fucking idiot, really. Come back, please._

At night, he lies down on Primo’s side of the bed and touches himself roughly, like Primo might have touched him. A little bewildered, always, at the intensity of his own desire, so many years after the Calati house and the first time he’d let Primo hold him against that barn door. Over time, the high of that hungry, wine-soaked summer had turned into a cocaine high, had turned into this, naked longing without the excuse of anything else. He never makes a sound when he’s on his own, isn’t usually vocal with other people, either, reserving the gasps and moans and breathless encouragements for Primo’s ears alone. When he’s finished, he falls asleep in a matter of seconds.

They have always been so attuned to each other’s wants, to the rhythms of their respective addictions. Maybe Primo has also noticed that they have been meeting at closer intervals of late, as if it had become… painful, pointless, reckless, to let too much time go by. It could be that as Primo tries to make do with a quick handjob from whomever is willing, in between a bribe and a bump of coke, Paul’s absence remains on the front of his mind, the long fingers and the cautious smiles and the desperate whispers of _More, more, more._

Maybe Primo has been desperate, too; maybe that will make him come back faster.

  
  
  
  


Spring drags its feet. A stubborn child of a season that doesn’t want to go anywhere. Primo spends long hours at his occasional office down by the port, pouring over accounts with Leonardo, which often end, much to Leo’s chagrin, with Primo breaking out a bottle of brandy and talking him round to accepting a glass or three.

Primo puts away less coke and more liquor these days. “Keep up, old man,” Paul might have said. He has kept the number that Paul had scrawled on the back of his hand, transferred it to the back of an empty cigarette packet that he keeps flattened in his jacket pocket. Sometimes, if he has been drinking alone, he will take it out and study it, the foreign arrangement of numbers, and wonder where the boy is now and if it hasn’t always been a matter of numbers between them. Dollar bills and bank accounts, car mileage and moments stolen away from responsibilities measured out to the minute. Paul the Third, with the expectation of generations sewn into his name, and Primo the first and only. Loneliness embedded in the gaps between the letters, and perhaps, if he has drunk enough, he will blame his mother for that.

So, he doesn’t drink alone, when he can help it. Instead, he pours another two glasses of the kumquat brandy Don Pipo’s elderly wife had gifted him, and makes some comment about his father that is only half a joke.

Leonardo sighs. _“No, Primo, nothing like him. For one thing, your father drank wine.”_

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


There is always work, always something to keep his mind occupied. Contracts to be negotiated and renegotiated, amends to be made, apologies to be accepted. Once or twice there is reason enough to justify a trip to New York – Primo’s cousin Giuseppe is getting remarried, his wife Carlotta having run off to Toronto with the children: something that his cousin regards as a mere inconvenience, apparently – but Primo declines. New York is not San Francisco. And none of it is what it should be: the apartment in Trastevere with sunflowers on the wall.

(Sunflowers. They do not talk about it. Always they have pressed on, moving forwards, never looking back. Perhaps the flowers are Paul’s way of saying he remembers. Perhaps they are his way of saying he forgives him. Perhaps they are just what they were that day, so long ago: so many faces that looked and saw and did not judge, because they were simply flowers in a field.)

Currently, Primo is held up waiting on the return of a loan. He recently lent a significant sum to a Sicilian outfit under the control of one Lurí Romano, who needed money to pay for a shipment coming out of Columbia. It was a loan Primo had been happy to provide at the time, on the basis of brokering ties with a powerful ally, but that was two months ago.

Now Renzo stands in the office at Gioia Tauro and says “ _We waited nearly three hours. Don Lurí’s men never showed_.”

“ _Then you should have waited four hours,_ ” Primo snaps, but only because he feels obliged to. They could have stood on the dock all night and it wouldn’t have made any difference. Lurí Romano is one of Sicily’s old guard; he doesn’t make mistakes. If his men didn’t arrive to hand over the money, it’s because he never intended to pay Primo back in the first place.

Primo lights up a cigarette and leans back in his chair. “ _Lurí has a son, no?_ ”

“ _Three, I believe_.” Leonardo rubs a hand over his face. “ _Fedele, Marco…I don’t remember the youngest._ ”

“ _The eldest, that’s always the one that matters. Future of the family_.”

Leonardo shakes his head. “ _The Romanos have powerful friends. Judges, politicians, police – don’t make trouble we can’t afford_.”

“ _There’s nothing we can’t afford. That’s why we’re the ones he came to for money_.”

“ _You know what I mean. Let me try and speak to him – at least wait until after the wedding, no? It’s been a long winter; people need something to celebrate_.”

Primo scoffs. “ _Lurí knew the kind of bargain he was entering into when he borrowed that money. We’re not the Romanos, Leo; we keep our word_.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Dante is married in the church at the top of the hill in an obligatory haze of hymns and confetti. In the village, weddings are usually summer business, but since this union requires an element of haste, people make do with shawls and cardigans as they crowd into the cold stone church. Rituals must be observed, after all – what else do they have? Even in the chilly March weather, they string ribbons from the trees and eat wild boar that Primo shot himself, and when he dances with the bride, he beats back thoughts of the boy in San Francisco who wears his ring, who might have loved to dance, but never will, not the two of them together like this.

Later in the evening, Livia Avretti and her reedy mother come down from their farm to offer their congratulations, and Primo has to call Francesco away from Livia’s side with the same kind of shrill whistle he uses for Jojo.

“ _You don’t talk to her_ ,” he says. “ _Nobody talks to her now_.” 

The Avretti women soon retreat into the gloom, their gifts left unopened.

  
  
  
  
  
  


_If I asked you to meet me here again, after Dante’s wedding – could you promise me that?_

It’s not that Primo forgets what he promised – it is simply the case that life does not always make allowances.

“ _A deal’s a deal, Romano_.” Primo paces the office, gripping the phone in one hand, the cord trailing behind him, while Leonardo ignores the cigarette turning to ash between his fingers as he watches.

“ _I make deals with honourable men,_ ” Don Lurí says. “ _Not peasants and pig farmers_.”

“ _We’ve been here before, you realise_ ,” Leonardo warns, when Primo has hurled the phone across the room.

Without thinking, he touches his fingers to the pocket where he keeps the cigarette pack with the San Francisco number on it, alongside the lock of Paul’s hair. “ _Don’t bring him into it, don’t you dare_.”

“ _You were ready to shoot him when the money didn’t come through back then, but we held out, didn’t we? It was worth keeping him alive in the end_.”

“ _This is different_.”

“ _Why, because you’re not fucking Fedele Romano?_ ”

“ _You know I keep a gun in the same drawer as that whiskey, Leo. I could shoot your balls off before you even got out of the chair_.”

Leonardo huffs and stubs out his cigarette. “ _And if you kill me, who’ll tell Paul Getty that the Romanos left your body on some beach in Messina, eh?_ ”

“ _A deal’s a deal. Lurí owes me a debt_.”

“ _You kill the Romano boy and you’ll start a war. I just hope you know what you’re doing_.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Fedele Romano is no boy. He is thirty-five, and there is nothing about him that reminds Primo of Paul. Paul who had panted like a frightened animal at times, or had clung to him in the dark and kissed the same fingers Primo used to load his rifle. Paul has always felt everything intensely, but Fedele only sets his jaw and frowns as though Primo has simply taken his seat on the bus, even when Primo puts a pistol to his forehead.

Primo Nizzuto is no peasant. He is forty, and he can still taste the blood in his mouth from the night his father shoved his face into the bucket under the dead sow. _Everything I have now, I earned. I earned it by my fucking wits_. He leaves Fedele’s body in Lurí’s car, douses it in gasoline, and sets everything alight.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


A deal is a deal, whether made with Sicilian mafiosi, blue-eyed boys, or the Devil himself, and Primo has an appointment to keep. Long overdue, it feels, by now. The phone at the port can make international calls, and so from there he dials the number Paul gave him.

“Hello?” It’s a woman’s voice, one he had not expected to hear again. It would be prudent to keep this short.

“I am looking for Paul.”

“I’m afraid he’s not here.” She sounds half asleep, and glancing at the clock on his desk, Primo realises it’s well past midnight in San Francisco. No doubt Paul is out snorting coke off some rockstar’s wrist, or letting shimmering people paint him and snap up his picture, taking and taking like they’re hoping to get a glimpse of the real boy underneath all the glamour.

“When is he back?”

“No, I mean, he’s not here. Last time I heard from him, he was in Rome.”

Rome. For a moment the word feels imbued with all its ancient significance, too heavy for him to hold onto and so he has to repeat it back to her. It seems absurd that the boy who couldn’t even wait five minutes under the bed when the Avretti brothers broke into the house to kill them could have waited weeks in the capital painting flowers on the bedroom wall.

“That’s what I said,” she replies, but he can hear the hesitation in her voice.

She has that habit he has noticed in most Americans of phrasing their sentences like questions, their voices rising at the end, but she throws this at him like a demand: “What do you want with Paul?”

She’s figured it out, then, or perhaps she just senses something wrong, the way a hunter knows when a wolf is on his tail. Just as he had done, standing in some stranger’s house eight years ago, Primo hangs up on Gail Getty.


End file.
